What's the deal with the crested Rollers?

 Some people have asked me "what the deal is" with the crested Blue Bar Splash bird in one of my earlier posts. "Rollers don't come crested", they say.

While it may be true that crests are not considered a breed characteristic and are not generally deemed as "acceptable" in Birmingham Rollers, they have been known to exist. Check out Thom Hatcher's book "The Last of the Greats" (1979) and you will see two peak crested Creams that were bred by the late Chan Grover in the late 1940's. At left, you'll also see a photo of a Cream Check with a peak crest bred in 1949 that was related to the two Cream Bars. They came out of some birds that Bob Evans had bred. While Evans was accused of everything under the sun because he promoted the idea of exhibiting rollers to help popularize them and he could be considered the "Father of Modern Roller Shows", Evans was a man known to have had a very high moral code. In addition to flying great kits of Birmingham Rollers and being an exceptional pigeon breeder, Evans swore that after the 1941 formation of the Pensom Roller Club, he kept only rollers that descended from the Pensom imports. Melbourne C. "Bob" Evans was a sports coach in his early years and later in life, a basketball referee. At Stanford University, where he spent most of his career, he was known as "Fighting Bob" Evans due to his straight-shooting ways and fiery temper. His reaction to public accusations that he was in the business of selling pigeons and especially, accusations that he was crossbreeding his Pensom Rollers (which was a violation of PRC rules) often culminated in some relatively hot public exchanges with his accusers and some incredibly intense public rivalries with his detractors. For a time, Bill Pensom was even among those detractors and took numerous public lashings from Evans. That being said, on the issue of showing rollers, near the end of his life (he died in 1964), Evans wrote an article entitled "Regarding The Matter of Roller Shows" (APJ, May 1960) where he showed just how straight a shooter he was by admitting that his detractors on the Show vs. Fly Controversy, who had expressed concerns about the potential detrimental effects of the "Show Craze" on the performance of the Birmingham Roller, had been more right than wrong. It takes a big man to publicly admit that he was wrong and this was just an example of the sort of character that Bob Evans had. Putting it another way, if the crested Cream Bars that Chan Grover had bred were off two Evans birds, they can be assumed to have been pure Birmingham Rollers. (Note: Some breeders have said publicly that the Crested Creams were actually birds that Chan had photographed in Bill Pensom's loft while he was stationed in England during WW2. That is not true. Note the band # denoted in the Crested Cream photo from Chan Grover's personal scrapbook; CBG #110-49. That was Chandler's personal band, not Pensom's. This confusion arises from the fact that Chan's scrapbook contained many photos that he did take at Bill Pensom's lofts during the war, but the scrapbook was not exclusively composed of such photos).  Some other breeders (including some who should  probably know better) have stated that the Crested Creams must have been bred out of birds that Chan had from his mentor, Les Manz, but that is also not true. I knew Chan Grover myself and he specifically told me that these "Crested Creams" came out of Evans birds and typically arose when he bred them too close for several generations in a row. Most of them were good sound rollers in the 25 to 30 feet range, he said.

Other breeders, including English fanciers, have also occasionally bred what are assumed to be "purebred" Birmingham Rollers with crests and other structural features. For the record, the shell crest is a simple recessive characteristic to the so-called "wild-type" or non-crested head, while in the chain of dominance, the peak crest is recessive to not only the "wild-type" head, but also the shell crest. As these were pre-existing mutations (ie. they were already known to exist in some established breeds) when the Birmingham Roller was created in the mid 1800's, it is likely that some of the ancestral breeds of the Birmingham Roller had these characteristics and were mostly weeded out by early breeders. To a large degree, this was also true of feathered feet in the breed, but THAT is another story.

That being said, it is important to point out that the Blue Splash with the shell crest in my post is NOT a Birmingham Roller, but is in fact, a North American High Flying Roller of the A.D. Blackburn strain.


I had written quite a bit about A.D. Blackburn, but since it did not save properly and was subsequently lost, it will have to wait for another time.

Until then,


~ Jack Chambers