Keepsakes loft
Please note: Adoptions are paused for 2025.
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About Us
Breeding pet Classic Old Frill pigeons pets since 2020.
Click below to learn about our loft, the breed, and pigeon-keeping in general.
Meet the Pigeons
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Terms of Service and Policies
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Snapshots from the loft
Our Loft
Keepsakes Loft is a small hobby breeder of Classic Old Frill (COF) pigeons located in the GTA area of Ontario, Canada. We are proudly registered with the CPFA, attend events, and look forward to involvement in shows when that becomes possible again. All of our squeaks go home banded and registered, with a guarantee of health and satisfaction.A lifelong love of these sweet, misunderstood birds led us to the purchase of our first pair of COFs, Duke and Duchess, in May of 2020, who had their first clutch in August 2020. We documented the hatching and growth of the babies, Bedwyr and Galahad, and the immense interest that the internet expressed in them led to us considering the prospect of breeding a small, select number of babies as pets.The loft's caretakers are James, and their partner Adrian who handles the photography and social media.
Personal praxis
Our loft is a part of our home - their space is our space. It also means that we focus on quality, rather than quantity of birds, and will only have a small number of babies available at any given time. We want to ensure that the peeps we produce have the best possible start.The human caretakers of the loft share the view that pigeons have been met with some pretty unfair "PR" in the last 60+ years, and it's going to take a lot to get the public to return to seeing them as intelligent, loving companions. The allure of COFs is that they are just so stunning - they really shatter peoples' expectations of what a pigeon can look like. When we tell people that we have pet pigeons, and show them what we mean, we often hear "that is not what I was expecting!"We focus on breeding robust, healthy birds from the best available stock. Our goal is to preserve the prim beaks of the classic frill while adopting the lean, up-right posture of the modern frill.
Classic Old Frills
Breed History
Much information about the origins and history of the breed can be found on the Wikipedia Page and on the website of the National Frill Club.Originally bred for the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, for centuries the breed was kept away from the common people."The "Hünkari", or as it's known today outside Turkey, "the Oriental Frill" was first imported to England by H. P. Caridia in 1864 from Izmir. It was first exhibited in National Columbarian Society in 1879 in America.The Old Fashioned or Original Hünkari (Oriental Frill) possess less exaggerated features unlike the Oriental Frill of today. They can still feed their own young, called squabs, by regurgitation, because their beaks have not been bred down to such an extremely short and blunt shape as in the new style show birds. There is therefore no need for foster feeders, of another long-beaked breed, such as homers, to feed the Classic Oriental Frill squabs. The old style Hünkari (Oriental Frill) is still a good flyer as it is not bred in larger sizes." (Wikipedia).
breed appearance