‘They always come home’: Inside the Belgrade home of Montana’s champion racing pigeons

BELGRADE — Dušan Smetana opens the metal gates to his pigeon coop, releasing a flutter of anticipation as the young birds, just two to three months old, fly into the open for the first time.

Moments later, the rural countryside fills with the elastic snap of sleek, agile wings as more than 30 homing pigeons launch skyward, swooping and soaring through the searing afternoon air above the Smetana family farm south of Belgrade.

To the untrained eye, it might look like Smetana has simply let his birds fly free, never to return. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Within minutes, most of the pigeons circle back, calmly settling on top of the rusty red coop as if they had never left.

“Those little babies come out, look around, and they somehow imprint on this place,” Smetana said, pointing to the far side of the coop where the newborn pigeons stay with their mothers for their first month before moving to the far side with the other birds.

Though he might appear to be just a caretaker, Smetana is something more: A devoted trainer and the guiding force behind one of the fastest flocks of racing pigeons in the West.

The sport, often compared to horse racing in both structure and intensity, is rooted in a simple truth: Homing pigeons will always return to the first place they flew from — and they’ll keep doing so for life.

On race day, competitors drive their birds to a shared starting point, which can be anywhere from 100 to 600 miles away. The bird that makes it home the fastest in its mile-per-minute group wins.

One of the most anticipated events is the annual Western Open, which Smetana helped launch in 2010.

Starting in Nevada, the race draws clubs from across the West and Pacific Northwest, including Oregon, Washington, Idaho, California and Utah. Smetana’s flock has consistently dominated the 400–499, 500–599 and 600–699 mile categories, winning multiple times over the years. In 2016, his birds swept the entire event, beating every competitor across all distances.

But winning isn’t easy. The return flight from the Nevada desert is grueling, forcing his pigeons to navigate jagged mountain ranges, freezing temperatures and unpredictable weather. Not all make it back — but once they’re released, there’s no turning back. Smetana can only trust their instincts and resilience to bring them home.

“You release them all together and they go every direction — and the chaos starts,” he said.

But once the birds are in the air, the stress of race day melts away.

“It takes me completely away from everything,” he said. “I forget about my photography business and traveling and I’m in my own world.”

To many Americans, pigeon racing might seem like a quirky pastime — something stumbled upon by accident or dreamed up in a movie. But for Smetana, who grew up in Eastern Europe under the shadow of the Iron Curtain, it was simply a part of everyday life.

“Where I grew up in Czechoslovakia, that was kind of our hobby. We were hunting, fishing, playing football and racing pigeons,” he said. “Lots of parents — not mine — encouraged to have pigeons because once you have them, you have to take care of them.”

While Smetana’s own parents raised chickens instead, he remained immersed in the local racing scene.

Some of his earliest memories involve helping seasoned pigeon racers, anxiously waiting for birds to return so he could collect their countermarks — a stamp with the birds’ identifying marks — and rush them to the village’s only official race clock.

“All these pigeon guys had to have little kids on bikes bring in the countermarks,” he said. “So I’d be waiting, and when a pigeon came in, they’d hand me the mark, I’d hop on my bicycle, race to that old clock and turn it in. You felt like you were carrying the Olympic torch.”

But after the lifting of the Iron Curtain, life took a different turn. Smetana moved to the United States, launched a photography business, got married and started a family. Pigeons became a distant memory — until the early 2000s, when an unexpected gesture brought them back into his life.

“When I met my wife in Bozeman, she asked what we did growing up,” he recalled. “I told her: Soccer, hunting, fishing and pigeons. I said, ‘You wouldn’t understand pigeons.’”

Six months later, in the middle of building their home, his wife, Lorca, told him they were taking a break for lunch. But instead of a meal, Smetana walked into a surprise: a table scattered with pigeon bands, two priests and a police chief — all members of the local racing club, which had formed in 1996.

“One of the guys gives me a band and says, ‘Remember, it’s all about winning the 500-mile race — that’s the most difficult,’” Smetana recalled. “I thought, I’m at the right club.”

The moment he got home, he started building his first coop. Not long after, he officially joined the Bridger Mountain Racing Pigeon Club.

While the club has always been small, with rarely more than a handful of members across the state, Smetana said it has long punched above its weight.

Its roots go back to just after World War II, when Dan Corcoran, a veteran Army pigeon handler and longtime Bozeman resident, returned to the Gallatin Valley. Having worked with messenger pigeons during the war, Corcoran remained devoted to the birds and became an honorary member of the club he helped shape.

Though Corcoran eventually moved to Arizona, Smetana said he was lucky to meet him before he left. He recalled one day following a flock of tagged pigeons and winding up at the veteran’s doorstep. At first, Corcoran seemed wary of the unexpected visitor — until Smetana asked about the birds.

“Come on in,” he recalled Corcoran saying, his expression brightening.

That same sense of kinship has followed him around the world. A frequent traveler, he said he’s been welcomed in places as far-flung as Morocco and New Zealand, often just by showing a pigeon band with a bird’s identifying number.

“You’re immediately family,” he said. “There is no other sport that I know of where people are so connected and so interested in each other and all the barriers are gone.”

That global community is mirrored at home, where nearly 500 active racing clubs operate across the United States, according to the American Pigeon Racing Union. In Montana, the Bridger Mountain Racing Pigeon Club, now run by Smetana, is the state’s only officially registered club.

His own journey into racing began in earnest in 2004, when he started with a modest flock of about 30 birds. Weekends soon became filled with training runs, releasing young pigeons 10 to 20 miles from home and gradually increasing the distance to build their stamina and homing instinct.

Once a baseline is established, the real races begin, typically ranging between 150 and 300 miles. But Smetana’s birds have gone much farther, flying up to 600 miles from release points as distant as Nevada.

Mileage, however, is only part of the equation. Behind every race is a rigorous routine of care and preparation. As both coach and caretaker, Smetana tends to his birds’ physical and nutritional needs — treating injuries from barbed wire, nursing survivors of predator attacks, and ensuring each is in peak condition come race day.

That same attention extends to breeding. Over the years, Smetana has become a strategist, pairing birds based on lineage, performance and endurance. He keeps a clipboard more than three inches thick with 16 years of detailed records, tracking every bird he’s ever had, from race winners to their offspring.

“Sometimes you have a really good racer, and it will never ever breed you anything good,” he said. “However, its brother, who cannot find its way home from Four Corners, gives you much better pigeons. Sometimes it’s a wild card. Sometimes it’s luck.”

Despite the time and care involved, Smetana said the sport remains relatively affordable, especially compared to horse or sled-dog racing. He spends approximately $1,500 per year on feed, primarily grains such as corn, wheat and peas, as well as a few protein supplements. Race entry fees cost another $1,500 to $2,000 annually.

Even his latest coop, split into two sections for racers and newborns, was built on a budget. Using leftover construction materials such as concrete roofing and side panels, he estimates the total cost at around $1,000.

As for the birds themselves, newcomers to the club don’t need to invest heavily, as the club provides new members with birds to get started.

But beyond the thrill of race days and the satisfaction of training, it’s the people that keep him in the sport. For Smetana, some of the best moments happen when the club gets together to share a drink and talk pigeons — or anything else.

“You have to interact with people,” he said. “You learn how to win, how to lose, how to help somebody ... you challenge yourself and you create something and you pass the torch.”

Jokingly, Smetana added that the sport of pigeon racing also proves beneficial to the partners of racers, as instead of spending long evenings away from home at the pub, they’ll always be able to find their partner in the backyard with the birds.

For Smetana’s wife, Lorca, that’s proved true.

While she doesn’t race pigeons herself, she helps care for her husband’s birds, including shuttling them to release points while he waits at home, and keeps her own flocks of white rock doves, which she often brings to community events like weddings, graduations and memorials for ceremonial releases.

“Once we got the birds, there was a big part of him that just settled,” she said.

The birds also became a parenting tool. Their children helped care for and train the pigeons, learning responsibility, patience, and resilience along the way.

“Even very small children can take care of them and connect with them,” Lorca said. “And for kids to have that joy and responsibility has been a big part of our life.”

Now, with the racing season in full swing, that sense of connection continues. This year’s Western Open, held in early June, brought Smetana another victory in the 400–499 mile category. On this warm afternoon, he gazes skyward as his birds dive and dip overhead.

While the sport demands strategy, stamina, and no shortage of time, Smetana said his favorite part is something much simpler: Watching the sky.

“I get goose bumps to just describe it,” he said. “You were separated from them and now they’re slowly coming back home. It’s very cool.”

Sometimes, he spots a tiny silhouette gliding through the clouds. Other times, they’re fighting the wind to get there.

Either way, they always return.