Police last week recovered 13 stolen racing pigeons within 14 hours, as training intensifies ahead of spring competitions.
At about 6pm on Friday last week, police officers on patrol in New Taipei City’s Rueifang District (瑞芳) noticed that a vehicle had been parked for a long time in front of a restaurant that serves alcohol.
Suspecting the driver might be drunk, the officers slowly drove past to see if it would elicit a reaction. When the vehicle pulled out after them, they turned around and blocked it.
Photo copied by Lin Chia-tung, Taipei Times
While performing an alcohol test on the driver, surnamed Chang (張), the officers noticed a cooing sound coming from the trunk, where they said they discovered 11 pigeons, rope nets and other equipment for catching the birds.
Chang and a passenger, surnamed Lai (賴), said they caught the pigeons at Nuannuan Sports Park in Keelung to train for racing, not to hold for ransom, the officers said.
However, police discovered that Lai had been implicated in a Taipei pigeon extortion ring in 2015, while Chang had a record of stealing lumber.
Police said they believed the suspects were stealing racing pigeons to extort the owners for money.
At 8am the next day, an informant surnamed Yeh (葉) told Rueifang police that a group had discovered three pigeon thieves in the mountains between Keelung and Rueifang and were able to stop two from running away.
At the scene, police found two men, surnamed Hung (洪) and Lai (賴), with nets and two racing pigeons, and detained them on suspicion of theft.
Based on the tags around the pigeons’ legs, the 13 birds came from as far away as Taoyuan, Miaoli County and other regions, police said.
The owners did not yet know their pigeons had been stolen when police contacted them.
They thanked the officers for “holding on to the fruits of our training,” police said.
Pigeon racing has been a popular leisure activity among Taiwanese since the 1970s.
To compete, trained pigeons are released a set distance from their coops and timed to determine which returns the fastest.
Races are held four times a year to correspond with the seasons, one enthusiast said.
As the pedigree and training of the pigeons are critical to their performance, some enthusiasts buy purebred birds from Belgium, the Netherlands and other places for millions of New Taiwan dollars, in addition to the about 120,000 breeders in Taiwan who raise coveted breeds, statistics showed.
Considering their value, some people attempt to capture pigeons during training and extort their owners for their safe return.
Additional reporting by Cheng Ching-yi and Liu Ching-hou
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck off the coast of Hualien County in eastern Taiwan at 7pm yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The epicenter of the temblor was at sea, about 69.9km south of Hualien County Hall, at a depth of 30.9km, it said. There were no immediate reports of damage resulting from the quake. The earthquake’s intensity, which gauges the actual effect of a temblor, was highest in Taitung County’s Changbin Township (長濱), where it measured 5 on Taiwan’s seven-tier intensity scale. The quake also measured an intensity of 4 in Hualien, Nantou, Chiayi, Yunlin, Changhua and Miaoli counties, as well as
Taiwan is to have nine extended holidays next year, led by a nine-day Lunar New Year break, the Cabinet announced yesterday. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday next year matches the length of this year’s holiday, which featured six extended holidays. The increase in extended holidays is due to the Act on the Implementation of Commemorative and Festival Holidays (紀念日及節日實施條例), which was passed early last month with support from the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party. Under the new act, the day before Lunar New Year’s Eve is also a national holiday, and Labor Day would no longer be limited
COMMITMENTS: The company had a relatively low renewable ratio at 56 percent and did not have any goal to achieve 100 percent renewable energy, the report said Pegatron Corp ranked the lowest among five major final assembly suppliers in progressing toward Apple Inc’s commitment to be 100 percent carbon neutral by 2030, a Greenpeace East Asia report said yesterday. While Apple has set the goal of using 100 percent renewable energy across its entire business, supply chain and product lifecycle by 2030, carbon emissions from electronics manufacturing are rising globally due to increased energy consumption, it said. Given that carbon emissions from its supply chain accounted for more than half of its total emissions last year, Greenpeace East Asia evaluated the green transition performance of Apple’s five largest final
The first tropical storm of the year in the western North Pacific, Wutip (蝴蝶), has formed over the South China Sea and is expected to move toward Hainan Island off southern China, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. The agency said a tropical depression over waters near the Paracel and Zhongsha islands strengthened into a tropical storm this morning. The storm had maximum sustained winds near its center of 64.8kph, with peak gusts reaching 90kph, it said. Winds at Beaufort scale level 7 — ranging from 50kph to 61.5kph — extended up to 80km from the center, it added. Forecaster Kuan Hsin-ping
RSS