The Roller has always been my favorite breed. I enjoy the ease of raising them, their relative gentleness, and the amazing range of colors and patterns. My father had a Rollers in every self and baldhead color that could be imagined and always worked on additional colors in baldheads. When I returned to the pigeon hobby I knew I wanted to get some Rollers. I was most fortunate that good friends of my family, the Kaelins in Kentucky, were very willing to assist me. They had obtained the majority of my dad’s birds when he had to get out of pigeons in1988. So they got me started back into Rollers. We are not able to fly our Rollers, so we have focused raising Almonds, Recessive Red, Recessive Yellow, White and Almond Baldheads for show.

The Almond (St) can be a most challenging color to raise. Dr. Gibson (p. 31, 2005) describes that “good marked Almonds are a combination of heterozygous Almond, homozygous T-pattern, heterozygous recessive red and homozygous Kite”. To get the “classical” almond in both cocks and hens takes raising many young and keeping very few. In addition to the Almond colored birds that we breed from we maintain a number of Kite (from Almond) colored to breed with Almonds, Almond X Kite. We do mate Almond X Almond and have produced very few young with the traditional bladder eye, blindness and overall lack of vigor associated with homogeneous Almond cocks. We have been raising an increasing number of Kite hens, as does the Kaelins.

First Almond squab of 2006!     

2006 Almond and Kite nest mates	2006     Nestmates
	2006 young from Almond X Almond pairs or Almond X Kite pairs

Recessive Red (e) and Recessive Yellow (dilute recessive red  e,d) are also closely culled to maintain a breeding pool with deep color and no bluish tinge, especially in the tails. We use direct Red X Red and Yellow X Yellow pairings but also Red X Yellow.  See Levi’s “Encyclopedia…” page 570 for red roller bred and owned by Link Sr. in the early 1960s.

2006 Recessive Red Roller Pair settling on a nest to raise another round of young.

2006 Recessive Red squab
	Recessive Red  cock  X      Recessive Yellow hen    raising red squabs
2006 young White and Red rollers

Recessive White (z*wh)They are recessive with bull eyes and are raising very well this year.

2006 white roller squabs

The Almond Baldhead is a project that I assisted my father with in the late 1960s. We paired an Almond cock that showed an unusual amount of white with a red baldhead hen. Much more common now but at the time the Almond Baldhead was rare. We still lots of work to be done with getting the “classical” Almond color stabilized in our baldheads so that the color is equal to our other Almonds.

   2006 young from Almond Baldhead pair - this very white young one did not develop blindness and is very healthy.

This young one from an Almond Baldhead pair has developed the "Almond" blindness in one eye. The blindness was not apprent at first but has developed as the bird has grown. A risk in mating two Almonds together.  We rarely see the blindness or the "lethal" gene in our Almonds, but it does occur.

Parents of the blind young bird.