Lost American pigeon faces death in Australia after straying from race

The bird, named 'Joe' after the US president-elect, survived a 13,000-kilometre journey across the Pacific but is considered a quarantine risk

The racing pigeon, named Joe after the US president-elect, sits on a rooftop in Melbourne, Australia. Channel 9 via AP

A racing pigeon survived an extraordinary 13,000-kilometre Pacific Ocean crossing from the United States to find a new home in Australia. Now authorities consider the bird a quarantine risk and plan to kill it.

Kevin Celli-Bird said on Thursday he discovered that the exhausted bird that arrived in his Melbourne backyard on December 26 had disappeared from a race in the US state of Oregon on October 29.

Experts suspect that the pigeon which Mr Celli-Bird named Joe, after the US president-elect, hitched a ride on a cargo ship to cross the Pacific.

Joe’s feat attracted the attention of the Australian media but also of the notoriously strict Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service.

Mr Celli-Bird said quarantine authorities called him on Thursday to ask him to catch the bird.

"They say if it is from America, then they're concerned about bird diseases," he said. "They wanted to know if I could help them out. I said, 'To be honest, I can't catch it. I can get within 500 millimetres of it and then it moves'."

He said quarantine authorities were now considering contracting a professional bird catcher.

The quarantine service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2015, the government threatened to euthanise two Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, after they were smuggled into the country by Hollywood star Johnny Depp and his former wife, Amber Heard.

Faced with a 50-hour deadline to leave Australia, the dogs made it out on a chartered jet.

Pigeons are an unusual sight in Mr Celli-Bird’s backyard in suburban Officer, where Australian native doves are far more common.

“It rocked up at our place on Boxing Day. I’ve got a fountain in the backyard and it was having a drink and a wash. He was pretty emaciated so I crushed up a dry biscuit and left it out there for him,” Mr Celli-Bird said.

“Next day, he rocked back up at our water feature, so I wandered out to have a look at him because he was fairly weak and he didn’t seem that afraid of me and I saw he had a blue band on his leg. Obviously he belongs to someone, so I managed to catch him,” he said.

Mr Celli-Bird, who says he has no interest in birds “apart from my last name”, said he could no longer catch the pigeon with his bare hands since it had regained its strength.

He said the Oklahoma-based American Pigeon Union had confirmed that Joe was registered to an owner in Montgomery, Alabama.

Mr Celli-Bird said he had tried to contact the owner, but had so far been unable to get through.

The bird spends every day in the backyard, sometimes sitting side by side with a native dove on a pergola. Mr Celli-Bird has been feeding it pigeon food since its arrival.

“I think that he just decided that since I’ve given him some food and he’s got a spot to drink, that’s home,” he said.

Australian National Pigeon Association secretary Brad Turner said he had heard of cases of Chinese racing pigeons reaching the Australian west coast aboard cargo ships, a far shorter voyage.

It is claimed that the greatest long-distance flight recorded by a pigeon is one that started at Arras in France and ended in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1931, according to pigeonpedia.com. The distance was 11,600 kilometres and took 24 days.

There are some known instances of long-distance flights but whether these are one-offs performed by the marathon runners of the pigeon world or they are feats that could be achieved by the average pigeon is not known.