For the birds

Don't try telling pigeon-lover Mike Tyson that people might see a softer side of him on his new Animal Planet series, “Taking on Tyson.”
“No, please, nobody would ever think to misjudge me in that perspective,” says Tyson, on the phone from his home in Las Vegas.
“And when you see these [pigeon] guys, you’re gonna realize these guys are no pushovers, either.
“You’re gonna see that these guys are not, like, ‘Hey, let’s walk the kids across the street today.’”
In “Taking on Tyson,” premiering March 6 at 10 p.m., the ex-heavyweight champ — who showed some surprising comedy chops in “The Hangover” — takes his lifelong passion for pigeons to a new plateau by learning how to race homing pigeons, something he’d never experienced.
The series tracks Team Tyson — Mike and his lifelong friend/manager Mario Costa, pigeon trainer Vinnie Torrie [see sidebar] and piegon-coop managers (and brothers) Junie and Rickie Roman — as they gear up for the pigeon-racing season.
Tyson, of course, has proven his toughness throughout his life — and he’s as surprised as the next guy regarding the macho characters who comprise the pigeon-racing community.
“You have to be very careful. These pigeons guys are very temperamental,” he says. “They may not look like it, but these are tough guys. I don’t advise you looking at their backgrounds, their records.
“They may have some gruesome stuff that you’d be surprised about.”
Tyson himself has been fascinated with pigeons since he was a kid in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he had a hardscrabble upbringing before discovering he could box like nobody’s business.
Brownsville was, he says, “a lawless town — back then you could beat your woman and a cop would say, ‘Hey, just keep it down some.’ ”
His first-ever fistfight, in fact, was triggered when the neighborhood bully taunted Mike and killed one of his pigeons — getting himself pummeled to a pulp in the process.
“Everybody said, ‘You’d better fight, Mike,’ and I fought,” he says.
It was the last time anyone ever messed with Mike Tyson or his beloved pigeons.
“Taking on Tyson” is set predominantly in Jersey City, where Costa keeps his “Tyson’s Corner” pigeon coop, which includes some pigeons that Tyson, now 44, has had since he was 14 years old.
Cameras track Tyson, whose main pigeon coop is in Las Vegas, as he immerses himself in the pigeon-racing world, which includes professional racing clubs in all five New York City boroughs and the (mostly) men who take this sport very seriously.
“Some of these people are quiet, some of these people are gangsters, some of these people are murderers and they all have this affinity with these birds,” Tyson says.
“If I was just a normal guy looking at Mike Tyson flying birds, I would think, ‘These are some country-a** people from down South,’ and that’s what I would think if I went in with a closed mind.
“But these guys are pretty dedicated to this stuff and it’s something that’s not meant for the weak.
“I needed to do this to broaden people’s horizons about the pigeon world,” he says.
“And what I learned was that I didn’t know anything [about pigeon-racing]. I’m constantly mad on the show ‘cause sometimes I don’t like the result.
“I’m used to being in control — and I had no control in this situation.”
Five things you didn’t know about pigeon racing
1.) Homing pigeons, known as “homers,” can fly 600 miles in a day. Races range between 100 and 600 miles in distance.
2.) All landing times are registered on an electronic clock which activates when the first bird in the flock enters its respective coop. The bird with the highest average speed is declared the winner.
3.) When a homer is 10 days old, an identification band is clamped on its leg for life. On race day, a microchip is snapped on the bird’s other leg and registers its band number on an electronic pigeon clock when the bird passes over a scanning pad in the coop.
4.) Both male and female homers are used for racing. However, most pigeon fanciers prefer to race the females. Approximately 98% of the racers are men.