Hi guys, Sorry, I know that this topic has been posted, spammed, and talked about here a gazillion times, but if you guys let me, I'd like to ask some tips about dove s***ve tossing. I followed Dan Sperry's method of training doves in his Technical Tosses DVD, and it worked for me, but when I started to load the dove in my s*****, and tried to toss, it just wouldn't come back in any of my shows, does lightning matter? Or can Dan Sperry's method be used in any situation be it stage theatre or an open kids birthday party in the backyard?

Thanks!
Markgician

Mark, if you plan on doing the flyback at a backyard party, you make sure your doves are thoroughly trained. More so than if you were just performing at indoor functions.

Regardless of what training method you used, the doves still have to be comfortable with you. Indoors, typically there is a light shining on you like a spot light. Tossing the dove toward that light will make the dove turn around because it can't see. When it turns around, you want to be sure the first thing it sees is you. That is why it must be completely relaxed with you.

Outdoors is a little different. There is no light shining. The dove has to be completely trained so it turns around automatically. The only way for that to happen is through repeated practice.

You should practice the s. tosses for a long time before you actually do them on stage.

The reason for so is that the dove, once having learned to turn around and fly back to you, gets conditioned to do so only after being taken and held, then tossed. You must first make sure the dove is comfortable inside the s. - take your time to that because it will likely not come out easily.

Then you start doing SHORT tosses doing a c-shaped motion with your arm (Think Greg Frewin's s. toss production using a table tennins racket), so the dove will be reminded by physics that it has to turn lef (Considering you do the s. toss with your right arm) to stabilize his flight and will look for a safe spot to land on, and the first one the bird will see is you. That is, given that the room you are practicing on has no perching spots, especially high ones.

Once the dove has become automated on it, you gradually move towards straight tosses. Then, after repeated thorough practice, the bird(s) will eventually do the turn so automatically that in order to perform really long flybacks you will have to do the toss with extra strenght, because the birds won't even think before turning around and looking for you.