A couple of cool stories as well as the results video and a cute pigeon video from a YouTuber showing a funny, adapted to human life, pigeon. The
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February 9th, 2010 by Liz
The 2010 Winter Olympics are set to kick off in Vancouver this Friday, featuring 15 winter sports . While that sure is a bag of fun, are you aware of the weirdest Olympic sports of all time? Learn about it below. Oh, and be prepared - a bunch of them involve animals.
The 7 weirdest Olympic sports
Biathlon : Sounds like a contest to see how much biology you know. In general, it’s a sporting term for one event with two disciplines. In relation to the Olympics, it’s a winter sport combining-cross country skiing and… rifle shooting. Yeah… I’ll stay a safe distance away from that one.
Imagine a time when there was no Internet. No Super Bowl. Not even World Wars to look back on. That was the year 1900 - a year when pigeon racing was an Olympic sport.
And, well, the only year that it was an Olympic sport.
Dare to believe in a whole new take on sledding. No, this is not the Rosebud from your childhood, folks. This is skeleton , a one-man face-down sled race on an ice track. I shudder to think why it’s called skeleton.
How much do you really trust your pet? Would you let Rover take the lead while attached to him with a rope… on skis? That’s
skijoring , and it’s ski-aring the bejesus out of me. In the 1928 Winter Olympics it was a demonstration sport, using horses.
Curling.
Curling , to me, sounds like it should mean something completely different - like some kind of salon Olympics. It’s anything but: the game involved two four-person teams sliding heavy stones towards a circle drawn at either end of an ice court. It originated in Scotland; somehow that makes sense.
You may be familiar with handball as a school recess favorite, but an older version of the game known as field handball did play a role as a sport in the 1936 Summer Olympics . It even had six teams contesting.
Korfball is a version of netball played in outer space… Kidding! It is, however, a mixed-gender version of netball played in 57 countries. It was a demonstration sport in the 1920 and 1928 Olympic games. Each team consists of four men and four women… but no mixed duels! Keep it clean, kids.
The Pigeon Insider newsletter sample:
Pigeon Racing and Nutrition of the Muscle Part 3
Another important function of these fibers is in the production of heat in cold weather through the familiar process of shivering. The trembling wing tips of a in good physical condition are another example of the function of white fibers. Both of these situations are good examples that illustrate the rapidity with which these fibers operate and just what is meant by fast twitch fibers!
Now, if we were to make use of an electron microscope and magnify and photograph many thousands of times, both the red and white fibers, we would see some further striking and highly important differences between the two. In looking firstly at the red fibers, we see that they contain many somewhat oval structures that ten to be present in chains, like beads on a sting, and that these structures are often separated from one another by what, at first glance, appears to be an empty space. The oval structures are known as mitochondria that, for our purposes, can be compared to a series of furnaces. Naturally, every furnace needs fuel and these “biological furnaces” are no exception. When we look closely, we see that the “spaces” between some of the oval “furnaces” are not spaces at all, but are actually droplets of an abundant and obvious source of fuel. It may come as a surprise to many fanciers, but that fuel is, infact, none other than FAT ! Given the historical ( and incorrect) belief of some fanciers that protein is the major fuel for racing, hence, the traditional emphasis by some fanciers on the use of high percentages of peas and beans as fuel feeds in racing rations, at the expense of cereal grains this information may be even more surprising. As we continue to examine the fine structure of the red fibers, we see that they also contain a considerable number of granules that have been identified as glycogen, a complex carbohydrate (or sugar) composed of many smaller units of the sugar glucose, sometimes also called, dextrose.
The importance of fats as the major fuel for racing, or for any prolonged flight, such as that of migrating birds, cannot be over estimated. For example, there is a small songbird known as the blackpoll warbler that nests each year in the Yukon and Alaska. As fall approaches, these tiny birds work their way diagonally south and east across the continent of North America, feeding and building fat reserves as they travel, until they reach the Atlantic provinces of Canada and the New England states in the USA. When fat depots are filled to capacity and the birds are much heavier, they wait for a high pressure cell moving in from the west and accompanied by winds from the north or northwest. When all is ready, the birds launch themselves into the air and head out over the vast Atlantic ocean. Only when they reach landfall three to five days latter, on the northeast corner of South America, do they touch down again, after an incredible non stop journey for such a tiny land based bird weighing less than two thirds of an ounce! Without fat, this amazing journey of over 2,400 miles (3,900 Km.), simply could not take place.
Pigeon Racing and Nutrition of the Muscle Part 3 By: Gordon A. Chalmers DVM
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