Prepare an exhibition or a pigeon race

Creating the exhibition

Name, date, place, exhibition type and number of birds entered are enough to open the record. Exhibition types can be customised from the Configuration page, with their name, icon and colour, and the ones shipped by default can be edited or disabled.

Creating the exhibition before the show rather than after has a practical advantage: the record then serves as the entry list, leaving only the scores to fill in on your return.

Recording the results

Every bird shown gets a result. Linking it to a bird from your aviary pre-fills the breed, the colour and the sex, and attaches the result to its record. A bird that is not yours can also be entered by hand.

The age category, young or adult, is chosen by hand: each exhibition sets its own rule, and the app does not guess it. The score is entered in the show’s own scale, whatever it is, with no conversion.

Pigeon races

If the Racing pigeons species is active, a second tab appears beside the shows: Races. It is not the same sport, and nothing there is judged against a standard. A race is described by its liberation site and time, your loft distance and the level of the event, from club to national.

The levels offered are those of your configuration: in the Statuses tab, choose “Race Levels”. As with exhibition types, you add your own there, hide those you do not use, and mark a level as training, which ace pigeons and statistics leave out. Distance categories are managed in the same tab, by choosing “Race Categories”; a category you add is outside the rulebook scale, with no cap on entries of its own.

Every pigeon home gives one line: its ring, its clocking time, its placing. The app works out the velocity from the liberation time and the distance, and the coefficient from the placing and the number of birds entered. These computed values follow your corrections: change a clocking time, a placing, the liberation time, the distance or the birds entered, and they update. A velocity or coefficient typed by hand, or taken from the organiser’s sheet, always takes precedence over the calculation. The app never establishes a placing of its own: your organiser’s result is the one that counts.

A single race often produces several results, from club to national. The ‘Result’ selector above the grid chooses the one you are entering, with its own number of birds: a pigeon can appear in it once per result. The pigeons sent before the liberation are chosen on the Birds page (see ‘Starting from a selection of birds’): ‘Enter pigeons’, next to the selector, takes you there. Each becomes a line without a placing that the sheet will complete, and its nomination order is entered in the grid, in the ‘Nominated’ column. A pigeon that does not come home is ticked ‘Not home’, and can be given the ‘Lost’ status.

The settings specific to the sport have their own section under Settings, ‘Pigeon races’, visible as soon as the Racing pigeons species is active: the velocity unit, metres per minute, yards per minute, kilometres per hour or miles per hour, the distance unit, and ‘My federation’. FCF, KBDB, PZHGP, FCI, NPO or a custom rulebook: it sets the coefficient base, the cap on entries, rounding or truncation and the number of decimals, which the coefficient keeps everywhere, exports included. Until you choose one, the federation is suggested from your account’s language.

Just below, ‘Racing pigeon loft’ places your loft on a map: drag the marker onto its entrance, or type the coordinates from your certificate in degrees, minutes and seconds. The distance suggested for each race starts from there. Without a placed loft, it is only estimated from your town, and the app says so beside the distance and beside the velocities worked out from it, with a link to this setting.

The federation, the loft and the units can also be set as soon as you sign up: the setup assistant offers them in a ‘Pigeon races’ step, provided you switch on ‘I take part in pigeon races (racing pigeons)’ at the species step. Whatever you skip there is waiting here, and that switch shows or hides nothing: the Races tab depends only on the Racing pigeons species.

Finally, fill in each race’s category, sprint, middle distance, long distance, marathon or young birds: the app does not guess it. Depending on your federation, it decides the cap on entries in the coefficient and the ace pigeon criteria. Those criteria, number of results, age, prize ratio, minimum entries, total distance, one result per weekend, are suggested from your federation in the ace pigeons window, where you can change them.

Import the sheet rather than retype it

The ‘Import results’ button saves you the copying. Paste your organiser’s sheet exactly as it reaches you, or choose a CSV file: the app does not look for a known format but for the nature of each column, which lets it read the fixed-width sheets of Belgian societies as well as spreadsheet exports.

No organiser’s sheet? ‘Download a template’ gives you a blank spreadsheet whose only row holds the column headings, in your language: ring, position, clocking time, velocity, distance and coefficient. Fill it in, save it as CSV, then import it. The order of the columns does not matter, and the distance is written in metres: if the race does not have one yet, the distance on your pigeons’ lines fills it in.

Before reading, check the ‘Result of the sheet’, the race’s own level by default: that is the result its lines will belong to. What the app understood is then shown to you line by line, with the bird each line matched, before anything is saved. You untick what you do not want, you correct a misread ring, and nothing is written until you confirm. Whatever the sheet gives and the race still lacks, distance, birds entered, participants or liberation time, can be carried over on the way. Pasting the same sheet twice creates no duplicate: a ring already in that result is updated.

A whole national sheet goes through, up to 4,000 result lines: beyond that, the lines of your birds are kept first and the preview says what was not read. Rings are matched by their identity rather than their spelling: ‘378866 2022’ on the sheet and ‘FR-2022-378866’ on the record name the same pigeon. When two of your birds could match, the line is linked to neither rather than to the wrong one.

With the Pro plan, the assistant can do the same through conversation when its actions are enabled on your account, with the same confirmation card before anything is written.

Starting from the bird rather than the exhibition

A bird’s record also carries the recording of a result, which saves opening the Results page for a single bird. The exhibition is looked up there by name, and if it does not exist yet, the form switches to creation: name, date, place, type and number of birds entered are all filled in on the spot, then the score is recorded straight after.

This is the path for coming home from a show, when you go through your birds one by one and the catalogue is still on the table.

Starting from a selection of birds

To enter a whole team, the Birds page is quicker. Tick the birds with ‘Select’, then choose ‘Add to a competition’: an exhibition or a race, then the event itself, most recent first. If it does not exist yet, the window offers to create it.

For an exhibition, each bird gets its result line, pre-filled from its record; the age class, score, title, judge and cage remain. For a race, the pigeons are basketed, and the sheet will complete their lines. Only pigeons are accepted there, and a bird without a ring cannot appear anywhere: the window names the ones to remove. Every status goes through, so you can record afterwards the results of a bird that was sold or lost, and birds already entered are simply skipped. From a race, ‘Enter pigeons’, in the results grid, on the race’s detail page or among the race actions on a phone, opens the Birds page in selection mode with that race already suggested. With the Pro plan, the assistant can also enter your pigeons when its actions are enabled on your account.

Following the results entry

The list does more than archive: each card carries a progress bar, the number of birds entered and the number of scores already recorded. An upcoming exhibition stays at zero, one whose results are all recorded shows one hundred per cent.

That is what makes it worth creating the exhibition before the show rather than after. The record first serves as an entry list, then as a data entry list on your return, and the bar tells you what is left to copy from the catalogue.

What the record gives back

The detail record shows the number of birds, the results already recorded, the progress and the average score. Charts break your birds down by breed, by sex and by age category, and show the spread of scores. A ranking sorts the whole.

The real value shows elsewhere. A bird’s results appear in its history, and as coloured badges in the pedigree tree. A line that scores well becomes visible as a line, which no show catalogue can show.

An exhibition’s results and a race’s result export to CSV or PDF from the menu of their record, and on a phone from their actions. Like every export in the app, they are reserved for the Premium and Pro plans.

After a few seasons

The Statistics page, in the Premium and Pro plans, sets your successive exhibitions side by side: how scores move over time, results by breed, by type, by place and by sex.

It is the last link in the chain that began with the configuration of your species. The birds entered, the pairs formed, the clutches followed and the shows recorded end up answering the only question that truly matters to a keeper: is what I am doing producing anything.