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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, Recessive White, Almond Baldheads, and Black Self 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.
 Almond squab!
 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.
 Recessive Red Roller Pair settling on a nest to raise another round of young.
| Recessive Red squab |
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Recessive Red cock X
Recessive Yellow hen
raising red squabs |
| young White and Red rollers |
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 Recessive White (z*wh) Our whites are recessive with bull eyes.
 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.
2008 Young Rollers
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