I am Dave Cooke from Spencer, Iowa.  I have been married to my lovely wife, Donna, for 31 years. We have two sons, Travis and Chad.  Chad has graduated from college and works for Wells Fargo Bank in Des Moines, Iowa. He and his fiancé Shantel are planning on getting married in August 2008. Our other son Travis is a manager for Spencer Bolt here in town.  He is married to Dee and they have a daughter and a son.  Our granddaughter, Ashley, is six who is in kindergarten and is in the photo on the upper left. Our grandson, Trevor, is two and is in the top right photo.  I have been a Certified Turf Specialist for over twenty years.

I have been raising pigeons since the age of ten.  I have had Modenas all of that time except for a few years in the 1970s.  The Modenas I have today are a project that I have been developing for twenty years.  My main color has always been the White Schietti.  The last five years I have been developing a bronze family from my whites and an outcross.  If you look at my pedigrees, the bird that is in the majority of my birds is a white hen number 84 that I named granny.  This bird came from Mr. Paul Ober and really took my family of birds to the level it is today.  With strict breeding techniques and proper mating, I can tell what will come out of a pair of my birds.  I love to have the nice frontal with a bull neck and gate post legs. There is not a bird in my loft that doesn’t have the majority of these features.

My other hobby is being a plant lover.  I am a horticulturist that starts all my plants from seed and transplants them around our home.  The pictures on the side show you the different plantings I do.  We grow around three thousand plants so this also takes up a lot of our time.

I am also a ham radio operator with an Advanced ticket. This is just a little about our family and my birds. I hope you enjoy going through the different pages on this site.

Dave!