In the south west of Glasgow, there's an area of Pollok housing estate where the doo men fly.

Spread out over a small square radius, each commands a fortress in their own backyard, a wooden shed built to hold a feathered army, complete with trap door, high security and battle tactics Alexander the Great would be proud of.

The goal is to fly your pigeons and have them return to you safely. But the real fun lies in trying to capture the pigeons of your neighbourhood rivals.

"This is how you cheat," says Darren McCulloch, emerging from his shed with a plump pigeon in his hand. It appears comfortable, if not a little bemused.

"You hold her down at an angle like this so it looks as though she's ready to tread (pigeon language for 'have sex')."

When the bird starts flapping, it entices nearby males in, so pigeon flyers less honest than Darren can capture them.

"I never do that kind of cheating," 41-year-old Darren is quick to add.

Faking pigeon courtship in your back garden to win an enemy's doo is, he hints, the equivalent of doping in sport.

Cheating is not tolerated. Stories fly through the Glasgow doo men of a time not so long ago when bar fights over pigeon cheats were rife and whole sheds were burned down in the crossfire.

What is allowed, though, is some careful preening. In the pigeon world, it would seem, gentlemen prefer blondes.

"You can use dye to lighten the feathers," says Darren, holding up a bird with a definite platinum sheen about it.

L'Oréal? Garnier Nutrisse?

"Ordinary peroxide," he says. "I guess it's like the page three of pigeon models," he adds jokingly, spreading a wing coloured a luxurious shade of soft caramel.

Darren is one of an estimated 1000 men in Scotland, many of them in Glasgow, who engage in the activity known as doo fleein'.

The hobby, which dates back at least as far as the Victorian age, involves arranging pigeons in pairs - a doo and a hen - which then spend most of the week enjoying an intimate companionship.

On a weekend, they are then separated and one of them, often the still besotted doo, is released into the sky.

A nearby doo man, seeing this, will send up a hen. The idea is the birds mate and each will then attempt to bring the other back to its doocot.

"I have a trap on the roof of the shed ready for when they land," says Darren, kneeling to show a wire that runs from a trap shaped like a pram hood above the doocot to a hiding place a few metres away just behind a fence.

"As soon as the birds alight on the roof I pull the wire and trap them both," he says. "Then they're both mine."

The captured bird is then given to a doo man from a 'pool' in another area of the city, who then gives a bird in return, and the game goes on.

"Some people name them," says Darren. "I had one my middle child called Lola. It's a no-no, forbidden though, for blokes to call them names. You'd get slaughtered by the others."

While Darren stoically resists admitting to being close to any particular bird, he does admit to a fondness for them.

"I guess you're not supposed to get that attached to them because they are just feathers but some live to about 10 years old so you do get a wee bit attached to them," he says.

"No doo flyer likes to lose a bird."

It's the lying in wait for a rival's bird that really gets the adrenalin going for the pigeon flyers, Darren says.

The game of man versus pigeon can really get tense, though it seems, not so tense as doo man versus doo man.

"We sometimes have nicknames for each other," says Darren.

"We'll call certain individuals 'fiddler' if we think they're up to no good. Or 'Jack Frost' which means your cold and you've no put your birds out."

"You also need a pretty understanding missus when it comes to pigeons," he adds.

"My wife Michele isn't a doo flyer but she has caught one. She's nicknamed herself a doo wag. Some of the wives are on the alert when the guys go out.

"Their missus knows how to work the cord so they can trap them. That's love. That's dedication."

While the older doo men say it is a dying game, particularly since 1990 when the hobby was particularly popular, a few have also said they have noticed younger lads picking up the sport.

"Some are as young as I was when I started, I was just 15," says Darren.

"There are still people willing to give it a go. It would be a shame to see it die."

"See when I've got nothing to do, when I've done my chores, I'll just sit here with a shandy or a coffee and watch the birds fly," he says.

"That moment when you see someone else putting a bird out and it comes right in to you, it gets your adrenalin going.

"There's so much to pigeons, but I guess that's the basics of it. You know your rivals. You build your army.

"Then you play the game and you see whose birds are best."

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