Send an Owl/Raven/Pigeon!

Harry Potter Lego kits. Oh, now, you gotta tell me about those, because I love Legos and I am hoping someday in my life to be able to play with legos again. Oh well, yeah, though the Lego kits are pretty great, They're not a sponsor, but I'm just saying there there are a lot of fun The Hogwarts especially is quite quite a kit. Uh. But you know, he also has a stuffed owl, which he has of course

named Hedwig after Harry Potters. And at the same time when he goes to bed, My wife and I are currently enjoying the final season of Game of Thrones as am I and my wife. Yeah, I was so your current. Oh yeah, we're cooked. Yeah, there won't be any spoilers in this episode, but but I'm glad that we're on the same wavelength. And uh, you know, and one day I think I'm I'm looking forward to actually finishing reading

the books as well, once they are all written. Oh yeah, so are you actually caught up to where the books are in the Song of Ice and Fire series? Am? I'm caught up and eagerly awaiting the subsequent volume. Me too, I've read them all and now it's been so long I'm gonna have to go back and read them again before the next one. Kind of I'm gonna have to

hit the Wikipedia entries. So in the Wizarding World of the J. K. Rowland created the Magical Community, they use owls to send messages back and forth, and it's sides beautiful and it's a subtly magical part of the book, right, playing on their traditional ideas of witches and wizards having familiars, as well as the very properties of owls that make them seem mystical right, their silence, they're nocturnal habits, their

wise appearance. Uh, but in reality, as we'll discuss No one actually uses an owl to send messages in the real world, but the more general idea of using birds to send messages is not so magical and not so far fetched. I guess that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Yeah, and likewise George R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books, uh, and the HBO of tdv TV adaptation Game of Thrones. Now, folks, if we call the books Game of Thrones today, don't get on our case. Right,

It's just it's the same thing. It's just what we've been programmed to do at this point. But in both properties, ravens are the bird of choice for members of the Citadel to relay messages to and from various castles, cities, and important locations. Yeah, they're the email of wester Ros. Yeah, and uh, you know it's it's described in the books that these clever messengers usually only function like real world

messenger pigeons. Right. They that that the summer smart and capable of traveling to multiple locations, but for the most part, you're sending a message from one place to another, right, Yeah, that's right. Actually to without any spoilers to extremely comic effects, sometimes in the TV show, especially where like it seems like somebody will write a message, put it on a raven, send it off and they get results within like a day when it was supposed to travel a thousand miles.

I'm not quite sure exactly how that happens. Yeah, things have to move a lot a lot faster in the TV series, right. I think this has led to a lot of memes where like ravens have jet packs on this well, and then they also have I believe there's an additional separate species, a white raven, that that used by the Citadel for particularly important messages. I don't recall that, but there's a lot of detail in the books that

didn't even stick. I think I've had a lot of a lot of time with Game of Thrones to to forget many different details myself. But you know, I think all this works nicely in the books in the TV series because it puts an alternative of universe kind of spin on everything, right, Like in your world it's a agent, but in in uh, in wester Roast it is it

is a raven. And then uh, you know, it's kind of like some of the other spins that they do, like like having this predominantly polytheistic version of medieval Western culture. Uh so this alternate of you know, vision of how bloodlines and genetics work. Though I do think they're interesting, not to turn this into it just a Game of

Thrones episode. There's some interesting parallels between the religions in the Game of Thrones world and uh and the religions of Western Europe, Like so you originally have these pagan, polytheistic religions. But I know George R. Martin has commented that the Faith of the Seven in the books and the TV show is really an analogy for the Catholic Church, even because it has you know, even it is considers

itself a monotheistic religion. It has a trinity, it has many saints and other figures, and and he just said, well, I just went ahead and made them all gods. Yeah, he he had. He did a great job of taking things that were familiar, tweaking them just a little bit

to where they still felt familiar. Like you didn't have to, you know, take a running start at understanding the religious world of Game of Thrones, but it was a little bit different, just just just a little bit skewed in a way that made it to uh, you know, resonate

a little more. Yeah and uh. And likewise, the ravens fit perfectly in this you know, this grim dark setting because the raven, of course, is a bird that's associated with with darkness and carnage, and so it makes sense that the characters would be using this bird to send their messages, as opposed to the peaceful dove or pigeons pecking bits of flesh from dead bodies on the battlefield.

That's how the raven is often imagined. But the way the ravens are used in the book, as we've already alluded to, is actually very analogous to real life uses of messenger pigeons. That's right, messenger pigeons, carrier pigeons. Uh. This is an actual method that that we use and have used for thousands of years to deliver messages as us long distances. Um. And and it's it's not it's

not really, It's not like a magically trained pet. It's more of an animal that will dependently, dependently return home after you transport it somewhere else and then let it free, which is a much less impressive trick, though still impressive. Yes, I mean it would be pretty amazing if you could just like send one to another city on command and then it would come back. Right, It's like imagine doing

it with say a guerrilla from the local Zooh. You're like, I want to send a message to the zoo where this guerrilla lives. Okay, well I'm gonna take one of its guerrillas with me when I visit another city. You know, that will give the guerrilla the message, Let the guerrilla loose, and the guerrilla will of course return home, thus delivering the message. So I guess that's where you get the idea. You may have heard the phrase a homing pigeon. Yes,

it is returning home. So here we are. We're talking about pigeons, we're talking about owls, and we're talking about ravens. We figured, we we know that homing pigeons. This has been a subject that that numerous podcast have covered. I know Josh and Chuck covered homing pigeons a while back on their show. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah, and uh, and so we we wanted to to to discuss them, but we figured this might spice it up a bit to also discuss them in relation to the owls and

the ravens. Of the world of Harry Potter and the world of wester Ros. And in doing so, we'll be able to highlight why the pigeon has worked so well for these purposes, and why we use the pigeon, and likewise, why we don't actually use ravens and owls. What is it about ravens and owls that that would make them ideal for this sort of work? And then also what you know prevents us from using them for this sort of work to begin with? Well, I say, let's go

pigeon first. Yeah, let's go. It's so, let's hit reality and then we'll dip our toes into the fantasy a bit. So first of all, let's let's consider some of the you know, the the epic facts UH from the history of homing pigeons that I think UH should ground their use in a real world that feels as epic as

anything from West Roash. So, so, first of all, it seems that pigeons were originally domesticated for food UH in the Middle East and in Europe, much in the same way that the jungle foul that we now call it chicken was originally domesticated in India and East Asia. So they were domesticated for their meat, for their eggs, which a pigeon has tiny eggs, but you can't eat them. The pigeon, uh is maybe not as robust as a modern uh, you know, hormonally enhanced chicken, but it's still

is edible. I mean again, if you've read the Song of Ice and firebooks, one of the common menu items at feasts and stuff is roast squab or stuffed squab. Of course squab would be like a young pigeon. Yeah, and you can still find squab on on menus in various places. Now, when we're talking about homing pigeons, the homing pigeon is technically Columba Olivia domestica. That's the domestic

version of the rock pigeon, which is just Columbo Olivia. Now, one interesting fact about the common pigeon, the rock pigeon, also known as the rock dove. In their natural habitats their cliff dwellers, they tend to live and nest on cliff faces and rock ledges, which probably at least partially explains why they thrive so well in modern urban landscapes full of buildings that function as artificial cliff faces. And I think we talked about this some with with our

guest Jason Mooard, who came on the show. Wants to talk about urban evolution, especially of birds. Absolutely a highly successful species, but back before their success was so guaranteed. Yeah, they were this this wonderful edible bird that you good stuff in cages pretty easily. And as you might imagine, people were you know, kept their birds, and they doing

so prohibited from flying away. And as they traveled around with these birds, and then I'm assuming they probably discovered the curious, independable way that these birds could then return to their home nest across increasingly long distances. And as such, we have been using bird, these pigeons for thousands of years to deliver messages. Uh, it is you know, it is a is a pretty ancient practice, but it appears

to emerge out of this original domestication for food. First to eat them and then you put them to work, right, which which you know it sounds rather this is Ultimately we're talking about very mundane use of the bird. Right, we're going to ease it for eating and we're gonna

use it for delivering messages. But it's also worth noting that pigeons have sacred significance in many cultures, though we often refer to them in doves in that in these instances, at least in the English language, right, the pigeon and dove, this is the same thing. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about about birds from the family Columbidae, which is doves and pigeons. Um. But you know, we can think to

the roles of say, doves and Christian symbolism. Uh. And even as it's kind of a secular symbol of peace, right, releasing doves um. Uh, you know too, is you know, a symbolic act. Right. Likewise, we can go all the way back to ancient Sumerian Mesopotamia where we see the use of the dove as an associated animal of the goddess in Anna. Ah, we love Ananna on this show. But that's interesting because Anana has multiple valences. Anana can be, of course, like a fierce goddess of war who screams

death through the rebel lands. Or she can be, you know, like a peaceful goddess of fertility. She has kind of both meanings in different contexts. And I wonder which which way the dove comes in there? Is it like the way we associate doves with peace or is it the way that doves can be used to send messages and gather intelligence during war? Yeah, I mean as just as a means of conveying information. It can serve both ends, right,

But it doesn't really seem like this. You know, this prior relationship of domestication with the pigeon is ultimately what sets it up for use. Is the carrier bird um or earlier people domesticated them, live with them and picked up on their abilities, and really the only other bird they think. Think to the other words that have a legacy of domestication, and uh and and in each one we can try to imagine to what extent they could have actually been used to carry messages. I mean, you

have the chicken. It's not gonna work. The duck, the goose though, that's the Yeah, the messenger chicken. That would be like a good cartoon. Well, okay, so the chickens out the duck and the goose. I couldn't find any real discussions of this, but I mean, they are migratory birds, so it's it's it sounds possible. But are they are

they ever domesticated? I don't know. I guess they are sometimes well, yeah, I've seen them, you know, listed as as birds that we have domesticated in some cases likewise the goose, the guinea fowl, the turkey, canaries and finches. But but of these, the domestication of the chicken, the duck, the goose, and the turkey those go back thousands of years, but canaries only go back to the fifteenth century, and

the finch to the eighteenth century. But you know, to put ourselves back in in ancient shoes on this right as as one presumably you know, picks up on the ability of the of the pigeon to carry messages. Just think of the advantage, uh, in a world where message delivery is only as fast as a human or a horse and rider can can travel across either open terrain

or more likely a series of winding paths or roads. Yeah, I mean, we take for granted now that we have wired or wireless communication that can send information electronically or whatever. I mean. Back then, of message had to be physically taken one way or another. Either you tell it to a person and they go deliver it in person, or it had to be carried by hand. Yeah, you had to have a runner carrying it or carrying it to

the next runner. Um. Oh and then yeah, yeah, if you're going from point A to point B, you're probably not able to go in a straight line. But the bird can. The bird can fly, you know, literally as the as the crow flies. Yeah. The bird also has the advantage that This is seen sometimes in the Song Advice and Fire series, where say, if your castle is under siege and no person, no human messenger would likely get by without being captured, a bird probably could get by. Yeah.

The bird can leave a besieged city and go relay a message. Um, you know, they might try and and shoot it out of the sky with a with an arrow, But that's why you have multiple pigeons, I imagine, or multiple owls or ravens in your fantasy set of treatments. Birds can also carry messages quickly over water, that's right.

Humans can't or I guess maybe could by boat. But yeah, it's it's easy to just to sort of focus on the sort of the primitive nature of tying a message to an animal with and and and just forget the tremendous freedom of movement that a bird like a pigeon has, uh. And then in terms of speed with a pigeon. We're talking speeds of of like fifty to sixty miles per hour and up to record speeds. And I think this is you know, when you're really pushing, when you're racing them,

you can get into the low nineties. Horses on the other hand, Uh, you're only going to reach the mid fifties. And that's going at full gallup. And that's like a

world record for horse. Yeah, that's like a common that's like really going and uh and again, the chances of you being able to send a message by horse at top speed, at record speed in a straight line, like on this magical highway that you've built between Fortress A and Fortress B, it's just not It doesn't stack up against the power, the the the message delivering power of

the pigeon. So to give everybody, you know, some more ideas about just the history the legacy of of carrier pigeon use I was looking at the Hallowed History of the Carrier Pigeon by Mary Bloom from the New York Times two thousand four, and so some of the high points of the author mentioned here, and I believe this

is uncovering a museum exhibit about the carrier pigeon. But we have, like an addition to mythical uh stories of in Anna in her association with the with the pigeon or dove, you also have biblical accounts such as uh Noah releasing doves or pigeons. Yeah, it was to test whether the floodwaters of the Great Flood had abated. I think it's in Genesis chapter eight where uh Noah releases multiple doves or either the same dub multiple times or multiple doves to go out and see if it can

land somewhere. At first, it goes out and it can't find anywhere to land, and it comes back to him. The second time it goes out and it brings back a branch, and that means the waters must have receded from somewhere. In the third time it goes out, it just stays gone and never returns. So if you love a dove, set it free. So the ancient Romans used pigeons for chariot races to tell owners how their entries had placed. Genghas Khan established pigeon relay points across Asia

and much of eastern Europe. Charlemagne made pigeon raising the exclusive privilege of nobility Pigeons were used for mill terry communication well into World War One, when the Germans rolled out carrier carrier pigeons with cameras that were soon replaced by reconnaissance planes. By the end of the Under the war, France had mobilized thirty thousand pigeons and they they had declared that anyone impeding their flight could be sentenced to death.

There's actually a famous story from World War One, I believe, about a group of Allied soldiers who had come under friendly fire from artillery and only managed to communicate to their allies that you know, like stopped shelling us by accident by the use of a carrier pigeons that saved many lives. Pigeons have been used to transport blood samples

from remote regions regions of Britain and France. In eastern India, they were used for communication between remote police out outposts, and as of at least last year, at least one of these uh lines was still in use. The US has used pigeons to spot shipwrecks. Drug drug traffickers have used pigeons seemingly around the world. I was looking various stories about this, and you know, I was finding hits from North, South, and Central America as well as in

the Middle East. You know, obviously you're not going to send like an entire brick of hashish up into the at a pigeon, But if you want to send a small amount of something like across the border or police area, yeah, I think you take a pigeon from its home, attached the drugs to it, and then let it fly home. Yeah, and that's exactly what some people have done. Uh. This is a fun account that my wife shared with me.

She was remembering a West Virginia whitewater rafting place from sort of like the predigital photo age, and they used pigeons. So what they did is, um, you know, you're going on this whitewater rafting ride, right, and uh uh, nowadays we just take this for granted, right. You ride some sort of a ride like a roller coaster, and at the end they sell you a picture of yourself enjoying

the ride, and of course now we do. It was just digital photography, but this particular white Water rapid place, the way they did it is they had a photographer with a long lens up on a hillside where they could get a good shot of the river. Uh, they would snap your picture as you were going down the river, and then they would take the film. They would attach you to the homing pigeon, send the pigeon like to

the end of the river where the pickup is. They would develop the film, and then they would sell you the picture. Because you know this is a course of that's when you want to sell the picture. Right, you're just getting off the rafting rides. You're excited like, oh, that was awesome, I didn't die, it was great, and then there's the picture ready to go like magic, and you pay for it. Now, that probably wasn't even possible until like SELLULARI to acetate film. Right, try to attach

it to Garat type plate to your pigeons. Work to understand that joke. Make sure you listen to our series of episodes on our other podcast, Invention, about the invention of photography. Those have been a lot of fun. If you're not listening to Invention yet, what are you doing? Go listen? Yeah, and you can check out the website at Invention pod dot com. Okay, I got one for you. You ever wonder about the origin of the term pigeonhole? Oh,

I'd never thought about it. But now I am, yeah, pigeonhole as a verb, right, Like, I don't want to be pigeonholed as just another whatever. I don't know exactly how I guess it means, like, Uh, it's sort of like the the idea of being type cast, right, I don't want to be pinned down in this kind of narrowly defined space. Well, apparently this expression has a very literal origin in the domestic pigeon raising trade. It comes from when pigeons used to be given like individual holes

or recesses to nest in. And then after that it later came to have another definition of quote one of a series of small open compartments, as in a desk, cabinet or the like, used for filing or sorting papers. Uh. And so that's like a standard definition which I think morphed further into the more abstract metaphor of having your person pigeonholed into a narrow slot. Interesting. Yeah, I'd I'd never thought about it before, but that makes perfect sense.

And that metaphorical definition came about, I think in the eighteen sixties and the mid late nineteenth century. All right, so why and how do pigeons carry out these impressive feats of speedy delivery. Yeah, why them? Why not some other bird? Why not ol? Why not owls? Why not ravens? Why not rats? Why not the you know, than the neighborhood house cat? And I think you might be able to answer this question two different ways that we could that we can get into more as the episode goes on.

But one explanation might be rooted in the sort of innate tendencies or abilities of each of these animals, and another answer might be more rooted in just accidents of history. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Like we already touched on the fact that the pigeon was domesticated, uh seemingly originally for food, and so that kind of like provided the groundwork for further domestic uses of the animal. Yes, but it is certainly true that pigeons have some very impressive qualities when

it comes to navigation and long distance travel. Right, their navigational abilities are essentially twofold. So first of all, they have a company system and this tells them which direction they're headed in and the sun, the position of the Sun and the Earth's magnetic field make this possible. But then they also have a map system, which tells them where they are in relation to where they want to

go now. And it's this ability that is a lot more controversial that we have sort of competing hypotheses uh, competing theories about how they're actually working. So it's not totally settled exactly all of the methods that pigeons have to navigate the way they do and find their way back home, right, there's still there's still research ongoing and as to what's going on and and complicating all of

this is the release site bias. This is when birds go off in the wrong direction at release, leading investigators to ask, well, what's happening in these cases to disrupt their return? What can we learn about the functionality by looking at the disruption events? And so the basic theories for how the mapping system works are as follows. First,

there's the smell theory. So odors carried on the wind allow the pigeons to map their way home, and studies have shown that the atmosphere does contain the necessary olfactory information UH, and pigeons have been observed to get disoriented when their sense of smell is impaired or when they don't have access to natural winds at their home nest.

And then there's the Earth's magnetic field lines, So like there is a theory that there's some kind of inherent magneto reception in the birds right, as a Cordula VI Mora and Michael M. Walker pointed out in a two thousand nine studying the proceedings of the Royal Society b Biological Sciences, quote, pigeons may derive spatial information from the magnetic field at the release site that could be used

to estimate their current position relative to their loft. Okay, so this sounds like it might especially help with like initial orientation towards their target destination. Absolutely and again working with that compass system. So these two things working together. Now, there is also a third um theory that I ran across, and this one's not as big as the other two, but to just get every everyone you know, an idea of some of the alternative ideas that are being explored here.

Geophysicist John Hagstrom has this theory that they follow ultra low frequency sounds back towards their lofts and that that this is why certain areas can confuse them and throw them off. He argues that topographic disruptions and ultrasound account for why some pigeons are thrown off track in known disruption disruption zones such as in parts of upstate New York. That was the region that the UH that Hagstrom was

actually looking at and conducting. You know, some experiments in UH and homing pigeons, they can hear sounds as low as point zero five hurts, So so they do have you know, they do have impressive hearing that that space. Yeah, However, it's also been pointed out particularly I was looking at a National Geographic article New Theory on how homing pigeons find home by Jane J. Lee UH pointed out the given pigeon might use UH, you know, either the smell

or the magnetic field UH mapping system. It might just depend on where their rays uh, you know, leaning on magnetic fields in some cases, smell on the others other areas, or perhaps leaning on ultrasound if that is in fact one of the methods at their disposal. Well, and that would sort of make sense given what we know about

our senses that we use for navigation. I mean, it would depend on where you were that you were trying to find your way to right Like some places it might be good to listen for traffic or something if you don't know if you're like trying to get back to a trafficked area and an otherwise wilderness like area, or it might make more sense to just look with

your eyes and see what kind of place you're going to. Yeah, I mean, in all of these cases, I keep trying to put myself in the shoes of the pigeon and imagine somebody like sticking me in a cage, transporting me, say, um, you know two counties over releasing me in the while and giving me a message to return to my house with to my house. Uh, And I would probably just

die in the woods in those cases. So it's uh, you know, it's we look at something like the pigeon, an animal that is not um held in high esteem by most people. You know. We we think of pigeons, we think of essentially winged rats in the city, and we we we may not stop to realize, you know, what kind of amazing navigational abilities they have, but they do. Uh. They pigeons can do can do these feats that that

humans would be completely lost to try and replicate. Do you think the pigeons internal uh, navigational computer is as annoying as the navigation app on most phones are, like you know, uh GPS devices, Um, I would think not because it's a part of them, right, I mean that the annoying thing about GPS technology is that it is external and uh, it's it's something we have to divert attention to or and or you know, we we drop our phone out of that little cradle or horsing around

with it while going down the interstate. I don't know what brand it was, but there was one I used to interact with fairly. It wasn't mine, it was somebody else's, but uh, but it was incredibly passive aggressive, so like anytime you missed a turn, you would almost hear it, like get kind of huffy. It would go recalculating. Yeah, yeah, they're all sorts of weird quirks like that. They've gotten a lot better, but yeah, it's still they don't Still

they still don't feel like a natural instinct by any stretch. Now, obviously we could spend more time here talking about the navigational abilities of pigeons and and certainly the way that pigeons and other animals, uh, you know, seemingly interact with the magnetic field. Uh, but we want to take a quick break here. When we come back, we're gonna move on to the next animal. In this episode, we're going to discuss uh, the owls of Harry Potter, but more

specifically the owls of the real world. Thank thank thank you. All Right, we're back, all right, Robert, give it to me straight. What are the what are the chances the fighting chances of a military force that wants to deliver messages between its ranks by the use of war owls. Well, it depends if we're talking about muggles or we're talking about members of the wizard in Community. I'm talking about real real world here. Well, just to take the pigeons

of World War One replace them with owls. What happens, Um, Well, then the messages don't get delivered for starters, because I think ultimately an important part of this is the of course, the legacy of using the pigeons. But the question, the bigger question is what what if there had been no pigeons? What if for some reason early on people had gone the direction of the wizard In community in the Harry Potter novels and had said, let's use owls. Let's let's

not focus on any other animals. Let's focus on this species or this species of owl. Can we use this animal to deliver our message just right? Whether rain or snow or dead of night? Will this owl deliver your message right? And I have to say, when we we set out to do this episode, my initial suspected answer

was going to be no, they can't. And I suspected that the reason was going to be that owls are dumb, that owls are like really dumb because and this is this is like, this is pre research, but I've found that multiple bird shows that I go to, you know, bird shows or like wildlife rescue places, places where they have, say an owl that can't be rereleased into the wild because it has a damaged wing, and so it's used

for educational purposes multiple times. Uh, the you know, the individual caring for the creatures has pointed out that, well, this owl is really dumb. It's just not a smart creature. Um, And so you know, we have their their limits on what we can expect from from it. That's strange. I tend to find that people who work directly with animals are tend to they tend to air on the side

of overstating the animals intelligence. Well, and I don't mean to speak for every like wildlife rescue individual out there or bird show worker, etcetera. But you know, it stood out to me, and it probably stood out to me because there is this idea of the wise owl, you know, um, you know, it's it's firmly established not only in pop culture, but in our mythic traditions. The owl was the bird

of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. They were thought to see the future, and of course they're nocturnal nature and their silent flight made them creatures of occult fascination. The Romans saw them as portents of doom. Uh. They fulfill a number of roles among the native peoples of North and South America, ranging from dire omens to uh, you know, actual spirits of the dead. And in some

some traditions the owl is an evil creature uh. And in other times that you know, it's associated with the goddess, as in Athena's case, or in Welsh mythology, the goddess blowta Wed is associated with the owl. It is not hard at all to imagine how owls could come to occupy a place of like terrifying spiritual power. Because have you ever been out in the woods at night and heard an owl? It's I mean, it's a cliche now because it's in the movies and all that, but in

person it is freaky. Yes, yeah. And then they have enormous eyes which you can't help but lock eyes with the owl, and it's it's intimidating to to look at them. They're just in there, just fascinating, impressive specimens. Um. And in terms of pop culture, who can forget the great owl from the Secretive Nim It's so good, but kind of Wilford Brimley faced owl. It had some heavy brows and mustache from what I recall, but it also glowing eyes. Um. And you know, there are a lot of different types

of owls. There's something like two hundred species roughly. They're amazing creatures. And there's somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred different species of owl. Um. By the way, possibly the largest owl ever to walk the earth the Cuban giant owl, which stood about three ft seven or one point one meters tall, and was either flightless or nearly flightless. A giant flightless owl. So what was it like a like a raptor that like run around along the ground

and snatch up its prey. I believe so, yeah, and you know, or could possibly have achieved, you know, very limited flight, much in the same way a chicken may fly. But but owls are are specialized killers. They're they're mostly solitary creatures. There's not a lot of social complexity to their brainload. Um, you know, it's it's it's more about the spotting uh and and perceiving prey and then stealthily swooping down on them and uh and uh and snatching

them up. But h but I was, I was looking into this more and I found a book, uh titled The Science of Harry Potter from two thousand two by Roger high Field. And uh, it's it's a pretty cool book obviously, Um, you know it's it's been out for a few years. But um, so this would have only been like the earliest Terry Potter books, right, Not that the use of owls really, you know, change as much in the series. It's pretty stationary. Owls are just how

you send messages. But the major reason he says that owls wouldn't be ideal for this sort of work is that most of them are rather set and terry, so they don't migrate, uh, and migrate Harry skills, you know,

would be ideal for the sort of messaging work. Um. It's it's kind of like if you've heard I know you and I have heard this uh presented and kind of like a self defense uh scenario by saying that if if someone is looking to say, rob you on the street, Uh, they have a Remember the term used was they have a small office, they have a small work area, and you want to get out of that work area because there's like just a you know, it's like a pickpocket or robber is working like within like

one street worth of area. And that's the similar case with a lot of predatory organisms. Uh. They ultimately have a small zone in which they operate. They operate very well in that zone, but you get out of that zone and you might be in the clear. Now, that might be a good point about the owls not being migratory and being fairly sedentary, But then again, I believe pigeons are non migratory or at least most in most cases non migratory, and yet they have this powerful homing

and messaging ability. And then also in high Field does acknowledge that, well, you do have some owls that are migratory, so you have I think two out of the five native UK owl species are migratory and nature and in theory could handle the ranges involved in most Potter World letters. Um. And they have great eyesight which would be useful as well. So we think of like the ways that these uh you know that that that have given messenger species would

find the places that needs to go. Well, the owl has excellent eyesight, could be it would be very useful. Now as for their brain power, um, he's he pointed out that there had not been a lot of systematic study of owl brain power, but this would have been too thus in two right, but he said, but he also acknowledged that, you know, there have been some some work in you know, looking at the memory of barn owls, specifically by Eric Knudsen at Stanford University, and that research

seemed to show that they did have solid working memories. Um. While on the other hand, some owl species were considered to be quote rather dim due to their at the predatory niche that they depended on. Now, but of course in all of this anytime we're talking about animal intelligence, where it's always a bit unfair, right because ultimately a given species is as intelligent as it needs to be

for what it does. And I mean, even given that caveat, I think we have learned a lot more about bird intelligence just in the past couple of decades than we knew before. Like, uh, it is becoming increasingly clear how smart corvids are, and we'll talk about that when we get to ravens in the next section. But we didn't

always know everything we know now about bird intelligence. I think the picture is becoming clearer that the birds are much smarter than we have long thought, though not every bird is equally more intelligent than we have long thought, right, I mean, it ultimately is a lot is going to depend on what that that particular bird, or in this case,

what that owl does. UM. For instance, I was looking around at some UM some some other some actual studies on this UM two thousand thirteen study from the International Journal of Comparative Psychology found that the great gray owl or Stricts nebulosa, which that's one of my favorites. There. That's that's I mean, that's that sounds like a spell

from Harry Potter. Um, these particular owls didn't do so hot in cognitive ability tests, they said to quote, our results suggest that the owl's failed to comprehend the physics underlying the object relationships involved in the task presented. But then again has pointed out in a two thousand four study published in Nature from Levy, Duncan and Levin's burrowing

owls or Atheny cunicularia, which is another nice one. Uh, they used dung as a tool, or at least they use dung as bait to attract dung beetles, which are a favorite prey. But you could would that be a like novel or cognitively discovered behavior or is that more

probably like an instinct? I don't know, but they they they were framing it in terms of, you know, this is a you know, potential tool use that is, you know, and granted any time your tool is dung used as bait, I mean it's not quite the same as using a uh, you know, a crafted twig uh to to pull grubs out of a out of a log or something. Just because it's dune doesn't mean it's not a tool, right Yeah,

But I mean it still works for him. So I mean, ultimately high Field had argued that, well, maybe maybe the NOWL could be used for for such purposes, and I think, uh, you know, based on some of the other research we're looking at, it does seem like the NOWL could pull off some of the feats involved. Well. I think one of the big questions that you would need to ask about whether a bird could be trained as some kind of singer would be how well do they respond to

training right and to domestic domestication. I mean, sadly, the popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies reportedly caused an increase in the trafficking of pet owls, which J. K. Rowling has is vocally condemned. By the way, do not go out and try and buy a pet owl just

because you're like Harry Potter. Um. But one of the important cases here is that that outside of the magical world or the realm of professional wildlife rescue efforts, owls should not be kept in cages and they're you know, they're not going to deliver your mail for you. But but more to the point that, you know, handling pigeons is one thing. Stuffing them in and out of cages by hand is one thing, but an owl has some pretty vicious talents that can certainly send you to the hospital.

So owls are just generally not good candidates for domestication right outside of a magical, um, you know, fantasy series. Uh, it doesn't say like the talents alone would give me pause. Um, if you you know, look up if you're if you're curious about this, do a Google image search on like owl related injuries. You'll find some nice wipes and slices here and there, and it'll be enough to make you think, well, yeah, maybe we should leave the owls alone as much as possible.

All right, let's take a break. When we come back, we will talk about ravens as messengers. Thank thank Alright, we're back. We've talked about real world homing pigeons. We've talked about the owls of Harry Potter, and to what extent the owls of the real world could or could not match up to their to the sort of message delivering service that we see in the Harry Potter novels.

They don't seem like great candidates and think, yeah, it seems like you're better sticking off, sticking with the pigeon unless you have the magic to make it possible. Uh. So let's turn now to Game of Thrones, to wester Roast and the use of ravens. Why are we not using ravens? And if we really wanted to, could we use ravens to deliver our messages? Uh? This one, I think the prospects are different, but maybe a little bit

better than owl. So you mentioned in mythology earlier that, uh you talked about the doves of the Noah story in the Book of Genesis. You know, Noah releases doves and eventually they let him know that all the waters are gone from the earth. But don't forget there's another part of the story. This very strange doesn't necessarily really seem to add up to anything, but Noah actually sends

out a raven. First. It's kind of hard to tell what the raven is supposed to be doing in the story when it starts off by saying, then it came about at the end of forty days, so it's been you know, forty days and forty nights of raining. At the end of forty days that Noah opened the window of the arc which he had made, and he sent out a raven and it flew here and there until the water was dried up from the earth, and then after that it just goes straight into the story with

the doves. Uh So that's confusing. I'm not quite sure what's happening there. I do know that there is some uh there's some series about the version of the story of the Great Flood that we have that say that it's actually at least two different original stories that have essentially been edited together in the version that we have of the Book of Genesis. So it could this could reflect different versions of the same story just sort of

being stitched together, but I don't know that. So, like one of them is the George R. Martin, Yes, exactly, and it was never finished, so they had to dislike slap it together with this other version of the story. Yeah, so some other author is like, I don't like the raven, I'm gonna do doves, okay, But they also didn't want to throw anything away, so the ravens still there. But yeah, anyway,

that's one of those interesting little textual mysteries. Uh So, but yeah, the question would ravens be good messenger birds as in Game of Thrones? Now in the world of George R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and the TV show Game of Thrones. The people of Westeros, they use ravens mainly to send long distance messages. Like we're talking about much very very comparable to the way people

have used messenger pitch. There's a scene where Master Ahman, the master like the sort of uh learned person at the up at the wall, tells John Snow quote, doves and pigeons can also be trained to carry messages, though the raven is a stronger, flyer, larger, bolder, far more clever, better able to defend itself against hawks. So I think we should keep that in mind, and we'll come back to it later to see whether Master Raymond's mostly or

not on the money. There. The first thing we should look at, of course, is whether in fact ravens are far more clever. And I think the answer to this is a resounding yes. Yeah. And this was I guess before we went into the research. My suspicion was they might be too clever like that that and and this may be you know, unfounded bias, but it was like, maybe maybe the owl is too dumb, maybe the raven is too smart. In the pigeon is just this perfect u uh, you know, a mix of skill and uh

in vigational ability. But also it's not gonna, you know, get bored and curious on the way. I can totally see why you would think that, but I don't think that's what I would think after the research for this episode. I think that that sort of underestimates owls a bit, maybe overestimates pigeons and ravens and and the unruling nous of intelligence, because it is the case that for many very intelligent animals it doesn't necessarily manifest as like a

surliness and rebellious nous. I mean, often very intelligent animals can respond well to training and conditioning, though often they respond in ways that are unpredictable to you, which is that's an interesting thing we'll get to in a minute about ravens. So ravens are corvids. They're a family of birds containing many other kinds such as crows, jays, and magpies.

Both corvids in general and ravens in particular have, especially in recent years, but for a long time, been known to be extremely intelligent, and especially in recent years, we've gotten these studies that show the startling displays of intelligence and lab conditions. And there are tons of examples of this. If you want a whole episode focused on this subject, go back to the one we did a couple of

years ago called the Unsettling Depths of Bird Intelligence. Oh yeah, that was a good one, and that we also talked a little mythology in that one. I remember Hoogan and Moon. Oh yeah, the Norse mythology that represents aspects of what Odin's memory, his thoughts and his memory. Uh yeah, And we also talked about it with Jason Ward when he came on the show to talk about the birds of the City. But yeah, they're just so many interesting stories

about what corvid's and ravens in particular can do. Just one recent example I was reading about about the intelligence of ravens in particular came from a couple of researchers at Sweden's Lunda University named Can Kabadii and Matthias os Fath, who did a study where they showed really intelligent, interesting forethought, or at least what seems like evidence of it in ravens.

So it's already been demonstrated many times that corvids, like crows and Ravens can use tools, and that's one of the hallmarks of complex intelligence, once thought to belong to primates alone. You know, if you go back and look at old textbooks, it's like only humans and the great apes can use tools. But nowadays corvids and certain occupy

take issue with that. Oh yes, certainly. And one of the interesting things about this to me is that tool using suggests that if you go way back in time, rewind the clock and just let evolution run out in a different way, if other types of animals with the seeds of tool using intelligence could have independently developed their own technological civilization the way primates like us did. Yeah, what sort of world would it be if it was a world of corvid technology? Raven world? But so, yeah,

we know now that corvids like ravens use tools. And this more recent study showed that once ravens had learned that they could use a particular tool to open a box and get a piece of dog kibble, which they absolutely love, they would choose if they could to grab that particular box opening tool and keep it on hand when the food box was not even present, so they could use it to open the box later whenever it was presented to them, maybe you know, minutes or hours later.

So that's already interesting. Like the bird is is recognizing, Okay, I can use this tool to get food. I'm going to hang onto the tool even though I can't use it right now. Yeah, they're thinking ahead. Also, the same researchers demonstrated evidence that ravens, on average have a pretty strong ability to delay gratification to get better rewards, like as demonstrated in humans with the marshmallow test. Yeah. Yeah, so of course the classic marshmallow tests. Why am I

getting a tickle that that? Somehow people have questioned the setting of that test. Now, there's certainly been a legacy of reproducing the test and altering the Yeah, different different versions of the test. Well maybe I don't remember what that is off the top of my head. Maybe we can revisit that in the future. But the basic ideas like, you know, if you cannot eat this marshmallow for five minutes,

you'll get three marshmallows or something. Um And and they do a version of that kind of thing with different animals to test their abilities. By and large, animals are terrible at this, just hopeless, you know, they live in the moment. They have impulses immediately, if a piece of food is in front of them, they're gonna eat it.

But in this UH, this current group, what the study found is that when you give the ravens a choice between okay, you can grab an okay piece of food right now, or you can grab a tool or a bartering token that the ravens have learned can be used to access a better, more delicious piece of food later.

One of these experiments showed that ravens will pick the delayed path to better food more than seventy percent of the time, to be exactly with seventy three sin of the time they'd get the tool or the bartering token that they knew would lead to the better delicious piece

of kibble. And in these experiments, the intelligence of the ravens in question was even sometimes an impediment to controlling the experiment, because, for example, I was reading a Motherboard article about their research where they talked about how there was one raven that started building his own tools to defeat the box UH, and so instead of using the tool they were supplying to the raven, it was like, I, I I can I can get around this, and so

it was like putting together sticks in an arrangement there where it could trigger and open the box without the tool they supplied it. And also that one raven apparently started trying to teach the other ravens how to exploit the box. And neurologically speaking, it's been shown, for example, in a paper in P and A. S by Olkawitz at All that birds like corvids and some parrots have an enormous number of neurons packed into the four brain areas,

uh quote. Large parrots and core it's have the same or greater four brain neuron counts as monkeys with much larger brains. Avian brains thus have the potential to provide much higher cognitive power per unit mass than do mammalian brains. So you know, mammals primates like us, we've got bigger brains than birds do. But it seems like birds are really packing in the neuron connections in there to make make more with less matter. But they're also really startling

h examples of social intelligence in corvid's like ravens. Like there's stories about bird trainers who have close relationships with pet ravens can train these ravens to follow and fly

ahead of them. There's even videos watching before we came in here of a BBC Earth segment where they had a raven trainer who had a relationship, a previous existing relationship with this raven that he'd trained for a long time, and this guy's riding along on the side of a fast moving truck with the raven just like flying along,

chasing after him, trying to land on his arm. So I mean that kind of activity, like the raven chasing after him makes me think, Okay, I see its potential possibility for like a delivery system involving ravens doesn't seem entirely out of the question. You know, I'm just remembering when we did this earlier episode on bird Intelligence. One of the things we did was I interviewed one of the researchers who had worked on a paper that we talked about in that episode on on bird Intelligence. Uh,

the researcher owner Gunterqune. And you know, I was asking him about the differences in cognitive ability between different bird species and basically the question of like, have we underestimated all birds or is it like just basically corvids and parrots that are smarter than we thought. And he was pretty generous in his estimate of all birds, though of course corvids and parrots. He said, you know, essentially there's no major cognitive difference between what they can do and

what primates can do. Uh so he's putting them like way up there on the cognitive ladder, like that they're much smarter than we realized for a long time. But even birds like pigeons and chickens, he put more on the level of like mice and rats, which you know, I think the average person would probably assume that mice are a lot smarter than pigeons, that that's not necessarily true. Yeah, and then the idea that a chicken is up there as well, I mean, checkmate Verner Herzog, Yeah, that's right,

who I believe what he was. Herzog had said that it's something about their being just this like the overwhelming immensity of stupidity and looking back at you from I think what he's seeing there is not stupidity. He's seeing like profound ancient magic. That chicken is a dinosaur. I mean,

birds are again dinosaurs. They're the avian dinosaurs. They're the dinosaurs that are left, and he is seeing a lineage going back tens of millions of years all the way to the Sorry, some deep cuts on Herzog interviews is here, but can't go too deep. Uh. But anyway, I think it is fair to say that ravens are much more strikingly intelligent than pigeons, but also that pigeons are probably

more intelligent than people usually give them credit for. Um. One interesting and funny Game of Thrones parallel I came across. There's a scene in the in the Song of Ice and Fire books where you know, the three eyed crow in the books, he's called the three eyed crow in the books and three ad Raven in the show. The guy played by Max von Sdo in the books, he

you know, he's talking to young brand Stark. Which another side note, I just found out the other day that Brand in Welsh I believe means raven or means but he's speaking to the character brand Stark, and he says it was the singers who taught the first men to send messages by raven. But in those days the birds would speak the words the trees remember, but men forget, and so now they write the messages on parchment and tie them around the feets of the birds who have

never aired their skin. So I think this is different because he's talking about warging and magical stuff that's in the books, but he's saying it used to be that you'd like tell the message to the raven, and the raven would go carry the message and when it got there, it didn't let you didn't have to take a tag of parchment off its leg. It would just tell you

the message. And this actually does have some basis in reality, because ravens, much like parrots, can be trained to mimic human sounds, like talking even better than parrots in some cases. And if you don't believe me, look it up. There are videos of this online talking ravens. It's creepy. No, it's not creepy, it's gorgeous. Yeah, well that that's amazing because I would just have assumed assumed that, you know, this is just a purely magical wrinkle in the world

building here. But yeah, the idea that you could you can on some level train a raven to mimic human language, that's that's incredible, I think, especially if you bred them for it, like the best, the best, the ones best at mimicking human language and talking. You bred them for repeating phrases, and you train them individually in their lives.

I don't know. I think it's not out of the question, but I don't know of any cases in the real world where there have been like breeding programs to try to bring out like the best talking ravens or even I mean, I didn't even know to what extent that's been done with with parrots. I wonder. Uh. Anyway, a few other things of notes. So I was reading about the University of Vienna biologist Matthias Claudio Loretto speaking to the writer Ella Davies for The Guardian in Seeen on

the question of ravens as messengers. So they're directly addressing this question from the Game of Thrones show. And so Loretto is a researcher who works with ravens, and he said the following. So he said, they're good flyers, maybe not well suited to quickly crossing long distances. Uh. Some bird species are already biologically adapted to rapid long distance migrations.

Ravens are not one of them. Basically, everywhere except in the Arctic, ravens are quote non migratory and move rather opportunistically. That said, they can sometimes fly across moderately long distances. And now I'm trying to think back to my my maps of wester Ros and exactly what sort of distances we're talking about between say, the Wall and winter Fell. I think it's supposed to be pretty far. I think I remember off the top of my head that wester Ros is supposed to be roughly the size of the

continent of South America. But to mention specifics about ravens traveling abilities, that that that research I just mentioned, Loretto and a couple of other researchers published studying Current Zoology in sixteen that GPS tagged ravens to track their natural movements out in the wild, and they found a maximum movement range for one day of of about a hundred

and sixty kilometers. That was the maximum. But this was not common, and it's way less than the daily tra raveling distance of say a car, you know, and a lot of ravens. Mostly what they did, the researchers discovered was they hung around quote anthropogenic food sources. That's not surprising, you know, like the bodies of of the dead that have been put up on pikes by some victorious army. That absolutely would be an anthropogenic food source. I imagine

this is more likely kind of a pizza rat scen area. Okay, But in terms of how fast they travel, they could be found traveling at speeds of up to forty per hour about twenty five miles per hour um. So let's see how this matches up against the Masta Raymond quote I read earlier about why ravens are better than pigeons at at delivering messages. So compared to the pigeon, Mast Raymond says, a raven is a stronger flyer, larger, bolder, far more clever, and better better able to defend itself

against hawks. So when he says that a raven is a stronger flyer than the pigeon, it's hard to know exactly what he means there would I know what stronger means, but in general I don't think that's true. If it means faster, that seems to be a no. Because the ravens normal top range of traveling speed looks like it's about forty kilometers an hour, and as we saw earlier, you mentioned the pigeon flies more than double that speed and generally flies a lot farther. Now, if he means

by stronger, he means like more acrobatic. That could be true. Ravens do have some kind of they got some good moves like and you can if you watch raven flight and slow motion, it can be very cool because they'll do like flips and twists and flapside down and all kind of strange stuff. Now, in addition to the speed and distance of travel, I haven't seen any indication that ravens have the same kind of long range navigational abilities

that pigeons do. They obviously have some kind of navigational abilities, but I've not seen evidence that there's has been shown to be of the same power as that of the homing pigeon. So the whole ability to find their way back home from great distance, that that may be more uniqu to the pigeon. Now, the part where he says it's more clever, that's absolutely true. Undoubtedly more clever. But

does that matter much in delivering messages? I don't know how clever does it have to be to just get something from one place to another, right, I mean, if they're not actively engaging in spycraft, if they're just taking a message and delivering it without getting snatched up by a hawk from one fortress to another. Yeah, how what do you need? I will come back to something you just mentioned there though another thing. The raven is generally larger,

that is what what mace to. Raymond says, that is certainly true. But does this matter if it's just delivering a small message written on a piece of paper. I mean it might be able to carry a heavier load if it needed to deliver something big. I mean, if you're smuggling milk of the poppy around, I guess come in handy. But yes, yeah, for just a message, what's

that can matter? Yeah, he says, it's bolder. I don't know exactly what that means, but I think that's probably true if it means like more aggressive, more likely to approach unfamili your objects, execute its training. You know, ravens are I think it fits that they are smart and bold and they'll do what they need to do when it comes to being better at defending itself against hawks

and other predators. I assume ravens are large. They have very few natural predators, mainly just humans and some of the larger predatory birds, sometimes including hawks. Uh. So yeah, I think that probably is right. They are better able

to defend themselves. So I think, based on what I've read, I want to say that while pigeons are generally preferred, and it seems like they naturally, especially when they've been bred this way, fly farther and faster with a message, I don't see any reason why ravens couldn't in principle be trained to become messenger birds, especially if they're bred for that purpose over many years, like the pigeons have been.

I mean, that's another thing to consider the domestication program here. Yeah, again we have to look at the the longstanding traditions that have enabled the carrier pigeon UH to to be the this E sees of choice for delivering small slopes of paper. Right. But then again, while it may be the case that pigeons are more suited for long range delivery for multiple reasons, ravens might be more useful on

other kinds of long range jobs. I would say, for example, if you wanted to train an animal to actively do spying or reconnaissance of some kind, like, I could imagine that you might be able to train ravens to go into an enemy encampment and recover certain kinds of objects and bring them home to you. Uh, probably better than you could train a pigeon to do something like that,

like if you were to train or raven. Like basically, the raven new that if it found a flash drive, yes, it could return that and get a special treat yes, and then you would just you know, receive flash drives and hopefully they would have something of of of interest on them. Yeah. And I think there are some reports that throughout history ravens have been rumored to have been considered for for like war surveillance and and espionage purposes.

I don't know to what extent they've ever been fully used, especially not to the extent that pigeons have been. But there's your movie set up, Raven, James Bond. You know, I was trying to think of examples of other messenger animals and fiction, and nothing was really coming to mind except for the I did, And I didn't read the book series. My wife had the books, but at least

the television series The Magicians that Arizon Sci Fi. They have these talking rabbits that they'll share, these Messenger rabbits, and they'll just sort of pop into existence on say your table, and then they'll speak in this um this kind of like weird. Uh uh I almost Gilbert Godfrey ish voice to deliver the message. Wow, yeah, but nobody, that's not We're not even gonna consider the possibility of

messenger rabbits here on this podcast. I think we should consider messengers to say millions like underground amphibians that burrow through the earth until they get to their target and give you the message. And messengers it's dirty. It's dirty by the time it arrives. There's some significant slime. Yeah. Well, I wonder if there are any other really fascinating treatments out there. I mean, ultimately, the bird, a bird is

going to give you the best bang for your buck. Right, It's gonna be able to to fly, it's gonna be able to travel in a straight line. Uh, it's gonna be able to execute a fair amount of you know, reasonable like stealth and avoidance of threats. And they're smarter

than we thought. Yeah, unless I don't know in West in water World, did they have like messenger fish that they used, even that wouldn't be as good as a messenger bird though, Yeah, messenger rats, I don't know well at any rate, if you're out here out there listening to this episode, perhaps you have encountered another messenger animal or another variety of messenger bird uh in fiction, and you'd like to share that with us. All. Likewise, a lot of people still raise I have a friend who

who just picked up raising carrier pigeons. So perhaps some of you out there have some expertise with pigeons that you would like to share. Perhaps you have some expertise with with owls or ravens you would like to share you have some insight on uh the intellect of of the raven or the owl or the pigeon. Obviously we would love to hear from you. In the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow

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