The Blackburn Strain of North American High Flying Rollers

Blue Offside Bald Blackburn cock
My top producing Blackburn stock cock

I had mentioned earlier, in the post about crested rollers, that I had written quite a bit about A.D. Blackburn and his strain of North American High Flying Rollers, and that it did not save properly. So here goes again ...
As I had briefly stated in one of my early entries on here, I have, for the last twenty or so years been keeping and flying a small family of Blackburn Rollers. Like the majority of the rest of my pigeons, I keep all my Blackburn breeders in individual coops during the breeding season. I say 'the majority', because I also have a small loft of Utility Kings for the purpose of breeding squabs and I keep those in an open loft apart from some special pairs that I am using to multiply what I think is my best breeding stock. With as many pairs of breeders (not just rollers) as I have in individual coops, it can be a lot of work during the breeding season to take care of the pigeons each day, but the reward for the extra time and effort is that there is no question about what bird is off of what parents. The fact is, contrary to the popular notion that pigeons are faithful to their mates, pigeons are actually pretty notorious for infidelity, especially when new pairs are introduced to an open loft. If you don't keep your breeders in individual coops, your breeding records really aren't worth the paper that they are written on and you are really just kidding yourself about the seriousness of your breeding program. Even if you really don't have the time or resources to breed all your pairs in individual coops (it can be pretty expensive and time consuming to put together a good set up of individual coops complete with all the waterers, feeders, grit cups, nest boxes, perches, etc), an effort should really be made by all pigeon breeders to at least keep their best pairs in individual coops since these are most likely the source of the majority of future stock birds. And it is better still, to set a long term goal of housing all your breeders in individual coops, even if it's a goal that you have to work slowly toward. You'll thank yourself in the future for making this type of effort, since it is the only way to really establish a proper breeding program.

Going back to the subject of my Blackburns, they all descend from one single old pair that an old timer had left 25 or so years ago. And what is more, they have been kept completely pure. This has been a rather difficult task to accomplish, especially since for the first few years I had them, all of my stock birds was very, very closely related. The original pair I started with was a Black Bellneck cock, a really grand deep roller in the air, and a Blue Check Badge hen, also a great roller, who also just so happened to be a daughter of the Bellneck cock. Not only was the cock 11 years old and the hen 8 years old, but from what I'd been told, they had not been allowed to breed successfully and the old boy who owned them, had been throwing their eggs away for several seasons and they represented the last pair of their kind. To aggravate the situation even worse, after only raising 5 youngsters from the pair, I went out one morning and found the Blue Check Badge hen dead. While this was a setback, fortunately, three of the five offspring of the pair were hens, which gave me three pair to work with the second season: two pairs of full siblings and a father-daughter pair. All of the Blackburns that I've bred since come down from these three pairs, which were not only closely related, but already linebred. As you can imagine, in having started with such a small core of birds, there is very little variation from one bird to the next in this family. 95% of them are Blue Bars in Baldheads, Badges, Bellnecks, Saddles and "Splashes", as well as quite a number of self whites. The vast majority are bull eyed due to the predominance of white markings in the family. One disadvantage to this is that it is sometimes to difficult to tell birds apart wile they are in the kit, which requires more effort to identify who is really doing what in the air.

As far as I know, they are the last members of the Blackburn strain, despite the fact that they once existed in great numbers in the United States. As I don't have many other pigeon fanciers living nearby and I'm not in the business of selling pigeons, to date, I have never sold, traded, nor given away a pigeon of this bloodline.

As a general rule of thumb, they are highfliers with a little bit of endurance and will fly for 5 or 6 hours regularly if fed properly and are good deep rollers, averaging about 50+ feet at maturity. They are a little less frequent than my other North Americans, but unlike most other families of North Americans occasionally exhibit aerial behavior that is much more similar to that of the old Central Asiatic Rollers and some families of Oriental Rollers, in that they will on occasion exhibit sudden bursts of fast dives down to lower altitudes and often come down in a peculiar corkscrew type maneuver. Early breeders of North American Highflying Rollers often remarked about this and other types of behavior that had been inherited from their early crosses to "Oriental Sharpshooters", Bukowinas and other pigeons which are among the North American's ancestors, but typically, these types of performances were not selected for and gave way completely for the standard of the "long roll". Like some of the other old strains, they also have seem to have a pretty good homing ability (believe it or not, some of the early Cleveland breeders of Endurance type strains of this breed actually used to race their rollers for short distances - sometimes out to 30 miles). None of these characteristics came as a surprise.

Self White squeaker with crest

One surprise that did take place was that during the fourth season, one day I looked at a pair of squabs and noticed that one of them was showing what was clearly a small shell crest. Over that breeding season, more and more of these crested birds began to turn up. At first, this seemed quite peculiar, but it was later brought to my attention that during the 1920's and 1930's, A.D. Blackburn had produced some birds with crests and it is also my understanding that the Casperson Rollers, which had similar origins to the Blackburns, also sometimes produced crests. For the most part, early breeders sought to weed this characteristic out, but as I discussed in my last entry on this subject, these characteristics which existed in the parent breeds of our birds, do crop up from time to time and tend to be easily exposed by inbreeding and linebreeding. You can see some examples of crested Blackburns with this post, as well as some without the crest.

A Blue Bar Bald squeaker with a crest. This is the
clutch mate of the white crested squeaker.

While I don't intentionally perpetuate this characteristic, approximately 35% of my Blackburns are crested and the vast majority carry the crest gene. Since my interest in Rollers is really strictly in performance, though I do appreciate the cosmetics of pigeons, I have not made much effort to maintain, nor eliminate this feature in the bloodline. If I did seek to eliminate it or sought to perpetuate only it, many fine rollers would have to be wasted in the process of doing so. As well, since the gene for the crest is a recessive, it is essentially hidden in its heterozygous form until breeding tests can establish its existence. 

A pretty typical clutch of Blackburn squabs. One is
crested (rear), the other plain headed (foreground).
Their sire is plain headed Blue Bald and the dam a
crested bull eyed White Self.

In the photos above, are a pair of crested squeakers - clutch mates. Even though both are crested, their parents are both plain headed. They are by the Blue Offside Bald cock at the top of the page and a fabulous Blue Bar Splash hen that is quickly establishing herself as my #1 stock hen.

In the photo at left is a very typical pair of Blackburn squabs; almost identical save that one is crested and the other is not. Their parents are a plain head Blue Bar Bald cock and a Crested White hen that was a real wizard in the air. As you can see from the photos, while the type and markings are pretty consistent, you never quite know if they will come out crested or plain headed (though if you breed two crested ones together, all the offspring will be crested).

The crested white self at the right is the dam of the clutch of squabs above.

As far as how this strain of North American Highflying Rollers was developed, they were originated around the turn of the century by Dr. A.D. Blackburn of Cuba, Ohio, a prominent early breeder.

Arthur Dale Blackburn was born on October 7th, 1879 at Lebanon, Ohio, the only child of Thomas H. Blackburn and Eva Bowars. Originally trained as a chemist and druggist, in 1888, his father turned to training race horses as a profession and after saving enough money, started his own race horse farm at the family farm at Lebanon. T.H. Blackburn was extremely successful in the race horse business and traveled throughout the United States and Canada racing his horses. Included among his successes were top places and winners at the Kentucky Derby. He also bred top quality Holstein cattle, Duroc pigs and Silver Laced Wyandotte chickens with immense success. In the "History of Clinton County, Ohio" published in 1915, several pages are devoted to Thomas H. Blackburn and his family, about which it is remarked "The man who tries to raise the standard of the live stock of his community helps to raise the standard of that community ... Thomas H. Blackburn of Blanchester is one of these men". In fact, T.H. Blackburn was so successful as an animal breeder that in addition to acquiring several large farms to expand his interests, he also managed to send his son to Cincinnati where he graduated from the Miami Medical College with top honors. In 1902, Mrs. Blackburn (nee Bowars) died. A year later, T.H. Blackburn re-married, taking Della Schumtz, only six years younger than his son, as his second wife. His new wife was equally interested in animal breeding, especially the cattle and chickens.

Meanwhile, Arthur D. Blackburn had relocated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to establish his medical practice. A news item in the "Medical Herald" tells how he saved a "presumably dead" suicide victim by bleeding his patient of a quart of blood and injecting an equal amount of saline solution in its stead, after all other efforts had failed. Amazingly, he was only eighteen years old at the time.

By 1902, Arthur had decided to leave Philadelphia. In their May 1902 issue, the "Medical News" reported that he had relocated back to Cuba, Ohio and intended to open an office there. On May 18th, the Ohio State Medical Board issued him a state medical license. His motivation for the move appears to have been a matrimonial one, for on June 4th, 1902, he was married to Bessie Clevinger. Inside of the next few years, the couple had two daughters and Arthur's medical practice was successful.

An advertisement for a cattle sale
A.D. Blackburn held in 1919

Despite this, Dr. A.D. Blackburn appears to have only spent a decade as a practicing medical doctor and was far more interested in following in his father's footsteps, for by 1909, it was reported that he had officially retired as a doctor and had moved to one of his father's farms at Cuba, Ohio. Like his father, he engaged in livestock breeding, mainly Holstein Cattle, Duroc pigs and Langshan chickens, all of which he became very well known for. He was apparently very well to do at this point, for various livestock magazines of the day clearly illustrate that he was not afraid to invest very large sums of money into his breeding. As one example, at a livestock sale in Owensville, Ohio in November of 1919, he had the highest bid of the auction and paid $820 for a Holstein bull. This was in a time when the average man made about $1200 a year.

In the meantime, he also found time to serve as the County Clerk of Clinton County and also developed a livestock spray that was designed to rid barns and poultry houses of "flies, lice and other insects", for which he was granted a U.S. patent in the Fall of 1919. In 1921, he took an interest in teaching and also later served as a school principal and later a school superintendant. In 1937, he was appointed as the County Health Commissioner and held the position for the next nineteen years. A.D. Blackburn died at the age of 77 years old on July 17th, 1957.

By about 1920, A.D. Blackburn had established himself as one of the top Roller fanciers in the country, in spite of the fact that he was not only still a relatively young man compared to his counterparts, but also the fact that he lived in the same general geographic area as most of those counterparts. Included among his competitors were fanciers like Charles Lienhard, F.S. Schlicter, F.W. Liebchen, Herman Baum, Richard Krupke (about the same age as Blackburn) and others.

In spite of the fact that Blackburn lived fairly close to the greatest Roller hotbed in the United States, he actually obtained his start from George "Old Man" Stevens of Toronto, Canada who is believed to have been the oldest roller fancier living in Canada at the time and who, around 1890, became the first fancier in North America to import rollers from Whittingham in England. It was also Stevens who is believed to have started the practice of cross-breeding Oriental or Asiatic Rollers to Birmingham Rollers for the purpose of increasing the depth of the roll as far back as the early 1880's. As T.H. Blackburn routinely raced horses in Toronto, it is generally assumed that his son's acquisition of rollers from Stevens probably coincided with one of these trips before Arthur went to medical school while he was in his teens. At the same time, it is also known that the birds he secured from Stevens were supposedly composed of a majority of Whittingham blood. Around this same time, it is also notable that two other soon-to-be famous Roller fanciers were also securing breeding stock from Stevens, namely Ole C. Casperson of Neenah, Wisconsin and J.V. McAree of Toronto. As McAree was the primary source for James E. Graham's breeding stock, this ultimately means that the Blackburn, Casperson and Fireball strains, all have a common origin.

Just like the Casperson and Fireball strains, the Blackburn strain also enjoyed immense popularity in the United States, but also slipped into relative obscurity and has practically become extinct.

~ Jack Chambers