Wagdy Ishak keeps his children on his roof – all 380 of them. They prefer it that way, since these are not his offspring by blood. They are pigeons.  "Without the pigeons, I would have married years ago," muses Ishak, 28, who is known by all as Kouka. "The pigeons are my wife. The pigeons are my children."  Kouka's hobby is not unusual in Egypt. From his pigeon loft – a spindly wooden column that looks like a medieval siege tower – he can see a dozen similar structures that teeter above nearby tenements in east Cairo. There are thousands more across the country, many of which add 10 or 15 metres to the buildings they stand on, and house upwards of 100 pigeons each.  Kouka has rather more, and once had rather fewer. Other breeders inherit their flocks, but he started his as an eight-year-old when an uncle gave him two chicks to care for. He liked them for their loyalty, a characteristic that pigeon fanciers often cite, and began to buy more and more birds at pigeon markets across the capital.  "I had the feeling that pigeons can't betray you," Kouka says. He points at a pair of 15-year-old pigeons that fly back to his loft every time he tries to sell them. "They don't want to leave me. I sold them more than 10 times and they came back again and again."  When fears about bird flu led the government to order the culling of Egypt's pigeons, Kouka refused to let the police take his animals. "I went crazy and I said whoever comes up here I'll shoot with a gun. So eventually they just said, OK, you can keep them but take them from the tower and hide them somewhere else." Not one was killed.  Other animals in Kouka's neighbourhood are kept for their milk and meat – goats and sheep squashed into upstairs rooms, caked in mud. Stray dogs and cats get even less love. But Kouka's pigeons are treated with considerably more reverence. In their orderly loft, each has its own booth in what looks like a oversized blue chest of drawers. Kouka feeds, cleans and medicates them at regular times each day.  He also trains them meticulously. Each young pigeon is first taught to live apart from its parents. Then it learns the layout of the loft. Finally, it is allowed to fly with some of the older pigeons which soar across the rooftops in the early evening for two or three hours.  Kouka teaches them to follow his whistles and signals – and those of his king pigeon, which leads the pack. It's no idle pursuit: Kouka wants his birds to be fit and disciplined so they can compete against other flocks in a local competition known as a nash.  In one version of this competition, a pair of rival breeders release some of their birds from their opponent's loft. With their remaining pigeons, each breeder then tries to entrap members of their opponent's flock. The flock that returns home with the most pigeons wins the nash – and often some prize money.  But for Kouka, it is the kudos, not the cash, that spurs him to compete. "The most important thing about the competitions is not to profit financially but to prove yourself. I compete with people in their 50s and above. For them, I'm very small in the pigeon world."  The centre of that world can be found on a Friday at the weekly pigeon market in Cairo's City of the Dead. Cages of birds line a kilometre-long street that stretches deep into the capital's ancient cemeteries. Some of the pigeons are grey, some brown, others white. There are long necks and short necks, plumed tails and flat tails, drooping beaks and bulging ones.  The humans here are a mixed bag too. Some are just breeders, with no interest in competing. Some are like Kouka: nash competitors who want a flock that can catch rival birds. Others want their pigeons to race in regulated contests over hundreds of miles – and they tend to sniff at young upstarts like Kouka, whose informal nashes are seen as glorified theft.  "The races are organised, but the nashes are all about stealing," winces Sameh Kamel, a keen racer, and one of 300 members of the Cairo Association for Pigeon Races and Development, a new group for pigeon breeders.  There are other hierarchies on display, too. The cheaper pigeons are for sale at the start of the street, for as little as £3. The pricier ones are further along, and the most costly belong to 69-year-old Sayed al-Gazawa, who has bred pigeons for 55 years. The birds he bought in the 1960s cost the equivalent of 50 pence. Now Gazawa sells some animals for more than £300.  There is money to be made if you know how, something Gazawa, the market's elder statesman, thinks has attracted the wrong sort of people to the pigeon world. "The old people with the passion for pigeons have died," he says. "The new young breeders don't treat their pigeons properly."  His son, Hisham Abdel Aal, a vet, agrees. He says cases of Newcastle's disease, which attacks a bird's respiratory and nervous systems, are on the rise. "A lot of people these days don't get them vaccinated," says Abdel Aal, plunging a syringe into a friend's pigeon. "Or they don't clean them properly and they die from bugs and bacteria."  But not Kouka's pigeons, which he treats as family. He makes his money from the recycling trade, most of which he ploughs into his pigeons. They cost him £70 a fortnight, as much as Egypt's average monthly wage, and with food and fuel prices rising in the country, that figure is likely to creep further upwards.  But Kouka says he won't stop spending. "What can I do? I love pigeons," he says from his pigeon loft. "A pigeon doesn't know how to betray, doesn't know how to betray his friend."  Additional reporting: Manu Abdo and Makarios Nassar
With lofts atop Cairo tenements pigeon keepers let a passion for birds take flight, investing hard-won cash and vying for prizes