Orlando, age 45, and his wife Omayra, age 24, raise pigeons on their roof in Brooklyn, and enter races all season long. His lifelong passion for pigeons began with the windowsill pigeon coop he made as a boy.

I’ve had pigeons since I was a kid, but we didn’t have a coop on the roof back then; my mother wouldn’t let us up on the roof. So my brother came home one day with two milk crates, and he manufactured this thing and he put it on the window, and that was our pigeon coop.

Then we got eight milk crates, and we put them inside our room, and when we’d let the birds out, we’d open the window and the birds would fly over our beds out the window. My mother let us do that!

I had a pair that I used to take to school. They were mated and so bonded together, that I would leave the male outside, and bring the female into school. Then I’d hold her up near an open window, and he’d fly into the classroom. It was sort of like Show and Tell—but it was more like bragging!

Finally I got old enough that my mother let me have a coop on the roof, and guys used to “tap you off” back then, which is when they would steal your birds. So we had to build these coops that were almost safes. You’d have a lock on the door that had a secret way of getting it open, so if they wanted to tap you off, they had to figure out what the secret was. And they never really figured out my trick, so you know what they did? It’s a heartbreaker: they threw my coop off the roof. With all the birds in it. From the fourth floor.

When I was a kid, I always wanted the racing homers, so I gave away all of my Flights, and I put a little loft, again, in the window, and I went and bought two racing homers from the pet shop. And I bred them and I thought they would stay, so I let them out and they didn’t come back. So I went back to the pet shop and there they were! And I bought them back , and the guy would say, “Those are great racing homers!”. He sold the same birds to me about five or six times. Finally I left for Florida to finish high school, so I went and bought them again and I took ‘em to Florida. I don’t know if they made it back—but they didn’t stay in Florida!

But my favorite story is about Marty. I entered her in a 300-mile race, but she never made it home. I figured a hawk had got her. But about two weeks later my neighbor called me and said a pigeon was hanging around my front door. So I went out to look, and there was Marty, with a broken wing and her feet all messed up and blistered. She had walked home.