Young Bird Training
At Three Months: Young birds should by now be flying well and if possible let out twice daily. Birds should be called into the loft by rattling a tin and given some trapping mixture, this is so they associate the rattle with food and learn to trap quickly when they hear the noise. Give the birds their main feed when all trapping mixture is eaten.
At Four Months: Basket training can begin. For a couple of nights before you start training put the birds in the crates to get them used to the idea. Release them in the morning for their fly and then call them in. When they are used to leaving the crates you can basket them up at night and the next morning take them about two to five miles down the road in the direction of your line of flight. Settle birds for at least 10 minutes, preferably 20 minutes before releasing them, the longer you can wait the better as they will get a line for home while still in the basket. If let out too early they will circle for a longer time and may drift further away from home making the flight back double the distance. I would release the birds in batches of about ten with at least ten minutes between the batches, if you are going to have a "fly away" you don't want to loose all of them in one go. Repeat the training from two to five miles for a couple of days to give the birds confidence in flying home and not to confuse them with too many new liberation points. Now you can increase the distance to five to ten miles, but stay with this distance until the birds come home straight away, this might be several times but be patient. When birds are homing straight away you can jump to ten to fifteen miles, stay with this distance until birds come straight home as before. You can now jump to twenty miles, as before stick with this until birds fly straight home. A couple of tosses from thirty miles about a week before the first young bird race are all that is needed.
During Racing: Once racing starts you can return to the twenty mile distance and train as often as you can, you don't need to go further as the racing will take care of that. The main point is to get the birds to come straight home, so a liberation point of twenty miles that is familiar to the birds is what is needed, don't confuse them with different liberation points every training toss. If you get a bad training toss or birds take a long time to come home, make sure they get a couple of days rest before you start again. I would not recommend training tosses of less than twenty miles when you have reached this distance.