EOTO - Carrier Pigeons

For those that are unfamiliar, a carrier pigeon is a homing pigeon that has been bred and trained to fly from point A to point B delivering a message. They would fly with a canister containing a rolled-up message from the sender. But how do they work? How do they know where to go?

It is a lot simpler than one might think. the pigeons are born and raised at a house. They then associate the house/coop with being their home. Pigeons have a natural homing instinct: the desire to return home to where they were raised. They have heightened senses of vision, smell, and hearing, that help them direct their way home. Pigeons have an amazing internal magnetic compass near their eyes and nose. They use this with Earth's magnetic field and the sun's location to direct to a general region. (https://www.historydefined.net/how-carrier-pigeons-work/)

If you wanted someone to be able to send you a message via carrier pigeon, you would send them a pigeon of yours (in a cage by carriage). Whenever they want to send you a message, they will attach a letter to your carrier pigeon and your pigeon will come home. First by finding a general region and then using man-made or natural landmarks to find your specific home. 

Pigeons were first used to relay messages during the Roman Empire. Beters would place their bets and once the race concluded, pigeons would be sent to them with their winning results (776 BC). Strabo, a Greek geographer, made note of messenger pigeons flying across the Mediterranean coastline reporting on the movements of fish (63 BC - 21 AD). 

Carrier pigeons were the better option over horseback or foot letters/mail. Those other methods of messaging had problems with dishonesty, accidents, delays, and lack of confidentiality. The pigeons are the better option because they are docile and easy to deal with, easy to capture and reproduce, reliable, and have a reputation for being great navigators. 

Carrier pigeons were most famously used in the 1800's and war times, specifically in World War I. Tanks were designed with a hole in the side to release a pigeon with a message. Ships would carry pigeons during war and if they were attacked the bird would be released with the coordinates of the ship and often times the crew was able to be saved. 

During the Siege of Paris 1870, 409 pigeons were used. Before switching to messenger pigeons, they would send messages floating down the river in mental containers. This was ineffective because it was unreliable and the messages were being intercepted. Six days after the Siege began, La Ville de Florence (a hot air balloon containing three pigeons and one pilot) sent out three pigeons at eleven in the morning and returned by five in the afternoon which is much faster than the river method. After the war ended months later, four hundred and nine carrier pigeons had been used and 79 had returned safely. These pigeons were facing cold, fatigue, Prussian bullets and falcons that were trained to intercept the pigeons. 

After the telegram was invented, carrier pigeons were used less and less. Today they are almost never used, with a few exceptions. In recent years carrier pigeons have been used in the Middle East to smuggle drugs across borders, bypassing security. There was an instance as recent as March 2023 where a carrier pigeon was used in London to fly drugs into a prison courtyard. Besides these one-off instances, carrier pigeons have been beaten out by modern technology.