Pigeons: Homing, Passenger, Carrier and Otherwise

cool goes again. He just blew me away with your pige in New York pigeon. Cool. I'm cooling here, Yeah, I'm going here. How's it going. I feel ashamed all of the stuff. Uh, we've gotten a lot of requests for um messenger pigeons we have over the years, and you said I'm going to heed the call and put together a nice little conglomerate of articles on it. And I thought it was super interesting and a bit confusing in terminology because as we will soon divulge, and I

guess we're about to messenger pigeons homing pigeons. Well no, not really. Oh yeah, the same like a lot of it is just right. I'm sorry for those. Are you chose the two that are the same all the others are different? Yeah, Homing pigeons and passenger peasants pigeons different, different um. Carrier pigeons different than messenger pigeons, which is

very confusing. It's all just confusing. Well, it's clear through the crud and the mare and the mock and get to the differences between types of pigeons, because most people do. When you think of a carrier pigeon, chuck, you're probably lumping together a bunch of different pigeons into the same category. And you would be right in a certain way, and that most of the pigeons that we consider carrier pigeons um are descended from rock pigeons. Yeah, we don't want

to be pigeon lumpers. No, all pigeons are different and beautiful in their own way, that's right. Rock pigeons originally named so from the rock dove I believe, which they inhabited mountains and sea cliffs, and I think that's why they were called rock sure, or they love poison. That'd be glam rock pigeons hair rock hair. Rock pigeons glam rock. No, not quite as glam rocks rock Glary Gary Glitter, Yeah, and I think a little older like glam rock to

me was seventies. Hair rock was the eighties kind of bastardization of glam rock. Not nearly as good as like the New York Dolls. Let's say, sure, right, you know who were way better than Gary Glitter as it turns out in the end, that's right. Oh yeah, she's forgot about that all right. Back to pigeons, we haven't even started yet. They were all descended from rock pigeons, kind of like do you remember a Thoroughbred horse Artum episode?

How can I forget? I love that one. Yeah, I didn't like it that much because I was it was dense for me. There's a lot of information there. The difference between thoroughbred horses and pigeons is that there's not that much information on pigeon legion lineages, despite the fact that some people show them right. And this is where we finally arrive at carrier pigeons. That's right, they are, as this article points out, fancy pigeons and their bred

to to to show their ornamental, very weird ways. Yeah, they have what's on their nose. If you look up a true carrier pigeon, you're gonna see a lot of pictures of just homing pigeons. But look until you find one that looks like it has a rotten walnut on its Now it looks like it's pecked into a tara toma and it's come out and just stuck around the bird's beak. Yeah, that's called a wattle, sir, wattle to two words, wattle dash sir, c E r E and um.

It is a fleshy thing on the bill, and they do say it resembles the texture of a walnut, and that's what it starts out as they get big and even more gross looking. Yeah, and it's at the top of the bill, which is when you see one, uh carrier pigeon with just one of these wattles on top of its beak, You're like, that's a little weird looking. But I've seen birds with that little growth right there before.

As they mature, these wattles start popping up all around their beak and it's it's just growny, like they have them beneath around the sides. It's gross. It's like a bird only a passenger passenger lover, Fancier would love like they love these things. But most people when they seem like, oh man, look at that right. Yeah, And if you're showing carrier pigeons like the pigeons like great, amazing waddle,

is is something to be shown off and displayed. It's like a point of pride among the show where or not me, Bud Fancier, I say, cover that thing up. People, by the way, who like just kidding, who like pigeons and are into showing and raising and using pigeons for fun um are called pigeon fanciers. By the way, Yeah, I just said that, Oh you did. Yeah, but I didn't explain it. I just slipped it in. Okay, well, wanting to explain it. Yeah, people are probably like, why

did Chuck just say Fancier? Who does he think he is? What does he think he's the king in England? No, but the carrier pigeon is the king of pigeons. According to fanciers, that was not bad. Uh. Pigeons were imported to the US from Europe in eighteen sixty, and by eighteen seventy two the first racing clubs were formed. Apparently Philadelphia has or probably still do or had the largest concentration of fanciers in the late eighteen hundreds, and um,

racing pigeons is a really big deal. Still yeah. The reason you can race pigeons is that rock pigeon descendants, whether they be carrier although I don't think I think carrier is the least strong of all of them, but especially homing and messenger pigeons, they're really fast and they are capable of flying their way their way over very long distances, that's right, And they find their way home because they return in general to their nest to mate.

So this is why they return home. And we'll get to how in a bit uh later, but like how to train them to do that? Well, how to train them in just how you know, science has figured out that they do this, because it's pretty remarkable. Um. So they fly around forty miles per hour on average, but can reach his high sixty and apparently a hundred to three hundred miles is just a walk in the park for these guys and gals. Um, they have a record.

I don't know if it's a documented record, but they've verified that a homing pigeon named Charlie flew and fifty miles from the UK to Brazil and he wasn't even supposed to isn't that crazy? Yeah, apparently he was in a race and um, I guess his nest was in Brazil originally, and he figured it out and made his way there to Brazil even though he was in a local race at the time in England. And the nuts.

It's pretty nuts. So apparently the racing pigeons and we could do I mean, there's so much on racing pigeons that we're not even gonna get to acide for mentioning it. But the racing homer is the specific type of pigeon that is bred to race because the homer is the fastest, which is ironic if you're a Simpsons fan. Oh yeah, because Homer is not a fast guy. Yeah, you know, no, he's really not. So. Homing pigeons are are bread specifically

to find their way home. I mean, they're good at it anyway, like you said, but they select of we breathe these things if you're going to be a fancier to do so. And when you're when you're raising a homing pigeon or something like that, basically what you're doing is you're taking it to a place away from its home. Yeh, smack it on the head right with a little tiny hammer so they wake up. Yeah, and uh no, don't do that, no pigeon, if you're ever just kidding, don't

do that. Uh. And then you release it and it will find its way back home, and you release it at the same time as some other ones, and whicheveryone finds its way home first is the winner. That's racing pigeons. But as you said, homing pigeons are really good at finding their way home naturally, but over time they've been selectively bread by humans to be the best of the best at this, Like compared to their wild ancestors, they make them look like utter poop. Yeah, just like your

basic rock pigeon. Yeah. Uh So let's talk a little bit about the different theories on how they find their way home. Um, there's some new findings and what they generally think now is it could be a combination of these things or like it seems like an everybody wins hypothesis. Yeah, basically, so, Um, the sun could be one way that they find their direction and just a general north south east west sort of way when it's cloudy the Earth's magnetic field. Uh,

there's basically two different things going at work here. There's a compass and then there's the map. And the compass is just your sort of like just us. It's a general header and the map is actually like where am I now and where do I need to be? Yeah, well, I'm back in New York. I'm one street and I need to get down to the lower east side. But the compass part is like, so that I'm right now facing north, which means I need to turn around a little bit and go until I'm facing east. That's right,

and using my map, I've figured this out. Yeah, this one study I didn't follow up on it, the one from Oxford that said they actually follow established roads at some point. Do you know, did you look into that anymore? No, I didn't see that. I wonder if that was just like a speculation and that's been overturned, or if they really do follow. So the fact that that we didn't run into that anywhere else makes me think like it's

probably been abandoned. It seemed from what I can understand that the two main competing, long standing, competing explanations, where like you said, they're following magnetic lines um in the Earth's magnetosphere, or they're following smells, tiny odor molecules that they used to basically as a trail of brig crumbs to lead them back towards their roost, their nest um. And for a long time this was it was debated

whether this was the case or not. Um the fact that they have such good compasses really lends a lot of credibility to the idea that they can follow magnetic lines and use those too to um orient themselves. And there's actually this anecdote from the early eighties that really lends a lot of support to the magnetic um theory, and that is there was this one pigeon that was

caught around a lake in Yellowstone. And by caught, I mean like it was seen for I think a few weeks, like just flying in circles around this lake, which is not what a home and pigeon is supposed to do. No, they fly straight and purposeful toward home sure wherever they are. UM. So this this naturalist apparently where'd you find this article? I'm not sure which one this was in? Uh, Audubon Society was one, and uh, well, well, I mean we've

got them all posted on our website. Right, Okay, So, um, this naturalist who wrote this article that we're talking about, UM got ahold of this pigeon and he took it and cared for it and took it away from the lake and released it. And the thing flew due east and it was a North Carolina pigeon and it was out in Yellowstone. So he said, you know what, this lake area has a really weird magnetic magnetic field. It's known for making compasses go hey wire. So this lends

a any decent amount of support to the magnetic line theory. Yeah, agreed, but it's been overturned recently or at least diminished as far as um the smell theory, right, Well, I don't know about overturned. I think again it's like everyone wins. I think from what I ended up with was that they use all of these things when it's most beneficial, like they'll use one. If it's like if the magnetic field is not as strong, then they'll go to one

of the other tried and true methods like smell. Yes, smell was another one, and then recently UM sound, specifically infrasound, which are sound waves super low frequency that we can't hear them. There's a geophysicist named John Hagstrom that cooked up this idea, uh and published it in the Journal of Experimental Biology, and he said, basically, he thinks that they hear their way home, which you know, makes a

lot of sense. Yeah, And apparently this um that pigeon back in the early piece that was around yellow Stone, that lake and Yellowstone that was having a hard time. Um. That phenomenon is called a release site bias. In some places in the world, if you release a homing pigeon, they're gonna have a hard time finding their way home or else they're gonna end up getting stuck flying around in circles. And it's generally unexplained. So it's led to this whole sub field of study of homing pigeon maps

and how they do this stuff. And um, this subsonic sound theory basically says that they follow basically sound maps. Yeah, sort of like echo location is what it sounded like to me with bats. Yeah, but they're just hearing. They're not like creating a sound and listening for the echo. They're just listening out for the sound. But they're almost listening out for sound in much the same way that they would follow, say, odorant molecules like a trail of

brick crumbs. They're listening for familiar subsonic sounds as low as point zero five hurts. Uh, And like you said, we create a sound map and um. He basically compared it to the same thing that we see when we look out with our eyeballs at something. Yeah, but they can hear it, right, So they would like see their home the way we see our home when we're driving like up to it. Yeah, they hear their home and they know which way to go toward it. Yeah. Yeah,

if you could see what I hear? Have you ever seen that movie? No? Is that a lifetime movie? It could have been if there was Lifetime back then, but it was the eighties movie. Was the guy that played the beast Master. He played a very famous blind man who was a piano player, and it was called If You Could See What I Hear? So I think blind people use sound in similar ways. Was it blind Tom the uh, the Savant? I can't remember. He's sort of

like a piano player, playboy type. I just remember seeing on cable when I was a kid, and I think Mark singer was the guy. Yeah, but I can't remember the real guy, but he was a real die. Did you see or hear about the Lifetime movie that um Kristen Wig and Will Ferrell made And no one can figure out if it was like a piece of comedy genius or else if they were like serious or what. Well, no, they figured it out. I mean they basically went to make the movie and just said, let's just do this

as straight up as we can. But because it's us, that'll just have that edge that you know, like Will Ferrell being serious is one of the funniest things in the world. So it was comedic genius. Well yeah, because it's them. But they weren't like, let's try and make this funny. They just said, let's do this as straight as possible. I didn't know if like both of them happened to have like a family member who needed surgery at the same time, so they like signed on to

this project. It's pretty weird. Have you seen it? Yeah? Yeah, I saw it, and it's it is tough because they are hysterical but it's so straight. It's like, I don't know how to register this. This is like like the Room or something like that Wow. Wow, that was just a bad movie that ended up being hysterical. But this isn't much the same. I gotta see this what the room or no, the other one? You gotta see him both what I've seen the room? Okay, what's the what's

the lifetime movie one called? I can't remember. I guess if you just search Will Ferrell lifetime movie, it'll come up. But there's a lot of weird things. He did that Spanish language movie, and he did that the mini series. Uh, he takes chances. Good for him, he's in a position to do so. H So I feel like this is a pretty good time to take a break, don't you. Yes, and re gather ourselves. Yes, let's do that starting now,

all right. So we everard basically how they find their way home and the competing theories, and I think they all just lived together in one big, happy family because they haven't disproved the theories. The pigeons, Yeah, the pigeons do too. They like each other, but I don't. I don't think anyone has disproven anything. So at this point, I think they're taking all comers as far as those theories go. Yeah. So, and this is um not specific too.

Is it specific to homing pigeons, although it would include messenger pigeons, wouldn't it because and carrier pigeons does it, but not passenger pigeons. Okay, so they're all dead. The only difference between a messenger pigeon and a homing pigeon is that, Um, a messenger pigeon has something either a two bonnuts leg or a little backpack that contains a message. I think the backpack is the new method, and they used to do the tube on the leg. I think

the backpack is way cuter. Yeah, it's adorable. Backpack, you can. What I can't figure out is a difference between a messenger pigeon and a carrier pigeon. Okay, so here's a carrier pigeon is not bread for flying, it's not bread for its homing abilities. It's not bred to race, it's not bread to send. It's basically, um, the Pekinese of pigeons. Okay, No, I got I got it. I'm just picturing them in my head, got you. So carrier is confusing me because

they're not They're not actually carrying anything. No, that is why it's so confusing. Of all of them, they should not have the word carrier attached. It should be like virtually useless pigeon with the horrible wattle on its beach. That's the new car pigeon. Hammer to talk them on the head. Now, that's homing pigeons. So carrier pigeons are are for show. Got you. They're the best and show of pigeons. So the homing pigeon is the one who

carries a message. Generally it's written on little tiny pieces of thin. That's the messenger pigeon, which is a homing pigeon that is carrying a message exactly. Yeah, that's where we are, okay, but I mean it can get confusing. I'm sorry to act to you know what I mean to be. No, I think I just said a messenger pigeon, didn't I I don't remember. Okay, let's through wine and listen. At any rate, the messenger pigeon is a homing pigeon that carries a message, and they have been around for

a long time. Egypt, the Phoenicians romans. Uh Noah, yeah, Noah in the in the Bible. He was the first dude. I thought those were doves. But apparently I ran across a comment on it that dove and pigeon were interchangeable back then, back in old timey aramaic days. All right, well that makes sense. Apparently in ancient Rome when they had chariot races that not just like a chariot race in a stadium, but like a long chariot race over distance,

they would send um the passenger. I'm sorry, man, here we go the messenger pigeons back with the news of who won. He right, so that I attached, you know, brutus one, this one, go tell them everybody, and I guess an hour later they would get there and everyone would be too drunk to realize that they cared at that point. Genghis Khan used them. He had like a whole system set up. Oh yeah, we've never really talked about him, have we? Yeah? We have. Did we do

an episode on that? Yeah? We did, Yeah, about whether or they killed like a million people or something. And I can't find that episode anywhere. I'm pretty sure recovered it. I felt like we did too. Jerry's nodding us or either she's falling asleep in the way over and over again. Uh so, yeah, Genghis Khan had a whole system across Asia and Europe like a relay system. Pretty impressive. Germans used them actually attached little cameras through their bellies. That

was World War One. Yeah. So the modern use of messenger pigeons uh in warfare was actually it seems to be started by the French and went all the way up through the Vietnam War. Yeah. So there's a like the French love using messenger pigeons in a war like setting, right, um. And there was the Siege of Paris. The Prussians were

attacking Paris, and Paris was finally saved. There reinforcements thanks to a group of carrier pigeons or messenger pigeons um who got word that Paris was being was under siege and uh they needed help, and help arrived and Paris was saved. As I said, a few times Prussians were defeated, and the pigeon was so beloved as a result that the same guy who um created the Statue of Liberty also created a tribute to pigeons that was that stood in Paris up until warld boar World War two, when

they melted it down because they needed the medal. I think so. So by the time World War one rolled around, pigeons were very much established as a very useful means of communication when all else failed. Um in war. Yeah, apparently they're so fast that they're hard to shoot down. Uh, and they get where they want to go. In the case in France and uh, how do you pronounce it? M A R and the Battle of the Marne, there were seventy two pigeon lofts and as they advanced forward,

they took the loss with them. A lot of the pigeons that were out carrying messages, Uh, we're out when they moved the loft were out when they moved the loss. And we're still able to find their lofts blind, not knowing where these lofts ended up. Amazing, go pigeons. Uh,

there was there were laws passed during wartime. This one Regulation twenty one A shooting homing pigeons, Killing, wounding or molesting gross homing pigeons is punishable on the defense of the realm regulations by six months imprisonment or one pounds fine. That's that's just a fine. In France, you could be executed for impeding, uh messenger pigeons a wartime pigeon, and there were also rewards offered five pound rewards, Uh for any You know, if you turn in your your friend

for shooting a homing pigeon, get five pounds five pounds exactly. Yeah, so it's a big, big deal. They were dogs, apparently two and pigeons were used heavily in wartime to carry messages like very reliably. Um, should we tell the story of Sheremi? How can we not? I don't see how we could. In World War One, you mentioned that the Germans were using um, uh, passenger or messenger pigeons with

camera strap to their belly for aerial reconnaissance. Right, it's like the bats with the bombs kind of, but this is more photography rather than incendiary destruction. Um. But the French we're using this for um messages, for getting them from the front, you know, to behind the lines HQ. And so were the Americans too. Apparently the French used like thirty thousand of them in World War One. Americans

had something like six hundred. But one really came through for New York Company at the Battle of the Argonne was October nineteen eighteen, towards the end of the war, and they were trapped by as the Germans. So this this pigeon named Jereh me Uh was released by I think it was New York Company, right, which was surrounded in a little low lying I don't even think you can call it a valley. I think the author of this New York Times article that we're getting this from

called it like a depression in the ground. And there's a few hundred men who were there. It started out as five hundred UM and they were starting to get whittled down because they were surrounded by Germans. Even worse than that, the American UM reinforcements had no idea where this this New York Company was, and they were they were showing them too, because they thought that they were

showing the German that were surrounding New York Company. They had no idea they were selling New York Company as well. So apparently they released a lot of pigeons, and a lot of pigeons got shot, which means that there were some German sharp shooters there. They were really good, because it is tough, like you said, to shoot down a homing pigeon because they are fast, or they were just shooting a lot of bullets into the air. Yes, you know. So they released one UM one of their last ones,

share me and share me. Um flew and flew and took off and got hit at least once had a quarter size hole in his breast, and it shot his leg off. Shot the leg that had the tube with the message saying where the New York Company was attached to that leg it got shot off, but it also got lodged into the hole and Sharemy's chest and the bird flew back to its roost like that. Ye gave the coordinates. Uh. I like to think that he chirped them out even and said forget the message, but he

was saluting I believe in love. Uh. And a hundred and ninety four men were saved, and Jeremy was awarded the KOA Digio with palm. Yeah with palm, I don't even know. Yeah, you don't want it without palm, No way, that's half the award. Uh. Sadly died in nineteen nineteen from the wounds. But man, what a great story. Yeah. Now he's on display. I'm not sure exactly where, but you can find pictures of him, uh, stuffed with just one leg and the other leg with the tube still.

A test has been preserved as well. That's probably at the Pigeon Ward Museum, probably in Providence with Rhode Island and Chuck. I I have to say, um, I read this one article too about it was called hawks and Doves, and it was about the irony of using rock pigeons, which are related to doves in some ways, or used to be called doves, as like a wartime symbol. Oh really, because they're very Peaceful's interesting. It's on her it's on

the page for this episode. Well, I think it's time for another little respite, uh, and then we'll come back and talk about the very sad story of the passenger pigeon. Right for this all right, Josh, we've talked about rock pigeons, which include homing pigeons, carrier pigeons, messenger pigeons, same thing as a homing pigeon. But there's something called a passenger pigeon which is not any of those things. And it is not a thing anymore. No, it used to be at I mean, it's a thing as far as past

tense goes. Yes, but there used to be a ton of them. They're a native North American bird. They're about one and a half times the size of a morning dove. They looked a lot like them. And uh, like I said, they were all over. Some say they made up of the North American bird population. Yeah, that's that's a lot, and they like to hang out together. They have the

largest documented flock um on record in Wisconsin. In eighteen seventy one, they estimated a hundred and thirty six million breeding passenger pigeons over eight hundred and fifty square miles of forest. Yeah, that was Wisconsin. There's supposedly another flock in eighteen sixty that reached three point seven billion flying

over Ontario. They supposedly blacked out the sky. Yeah. And these are credible witnesses who are writing about these things back in the early nineteenth century, like John James Audubon, one who number one knew his birds a little bit, knew what he was talking about, and it was a credible scientist. And he wrote about a ride from I think Lexington to um Louisville in Kentucky in eighteen thirteen, and he talked about how long the way the sun was blotted out and the sky from horizon to horizon

was filled with um passenger pigeons. It was either that of the opium and this this wasn't like a thing where it just happened, and you know, they flew overhead and that was amazing. This went on for the whole three day journey from Lexington to Louisville. The whole three days, the sun was blotted out by one single flock of passenger pigeons flying overhead, the same flock. Amazing, Like, you

just don't see that these days. Well, no, and you definitely don't see that these days because, like we said, they are completely extinct at this point. And you sit along a rate article called one years after her death, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, still resonates. And what happened was a couple of things. One um, they were hunted relentlessly

for massive amounts of food. Oh yeah, when those flocks can fly overhead, you know, you can just close your eyes and start shooting up in the air and all tons of passenger pigeons are gonna fall around you. Yes, Like if you hunt something that big out of existence, then you're doing a lot of hunting. So was that combined with the deforestation of the East coast? Uh? If they think both of those things led to the complete extinction. Yeah, because they fed on mast which is one of my

favorite words of all time. Mass is like the description of like, um, hardwood forest nuts like acorns and chestnuts and hickory nuts and stuff like that. Combined those things are called mass, right, And I think they fed together

as well, right, Yes, in groups. Right. So if you start to bill roads, or you build like the world's first subdivision in eighteen fifteen or something like that, and you cut down a bunch of this forest, you fracture this eight hundred and fifty square mile roost, this nest, and you have a big problem if you're a passenger pigeons. So that combined with overpredation by humans led to their extinctions.

So think about this, chuck. In the eighteen seventies, there were billions of these things bills in nineteen fourteen the last one died, So in like thirty forty years they went from billions to extinct like that. Yes, And that was Martha reference in the article. Um. She was born into captivity, they believe at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo and then donated later to the Cincinnati's Cincinnati Zoo. And um they believe in nineteen hundred that there were these three populations

were all that was left. Yeah, the last one ever seen in the wild was in eighteen ninety nine. So they eventually died down and died down on Martha sadly ended up like trembling in a cage because people would throw sand at her to wake her up and like have her move. So they indiventually had to you know, wall that up, and she pricked her in for her own safety. It's so sad. Uh. So they died out completely and now she's on display at the Smithsonian until

October October this year. Uh, which is uh, which is a what Chuck Well, a big lesson to mankind on what can happen that's right, if you hunt too much and if you build too many parking lots. Well, you know, there's a there's a big discussion over the passenger pigeon and bring it back. One of my personal heroes, Charles Man, is caught in the center of this. Yes he is. Did not know that, so you know, he wrote one of my favorite book and in he talks about um.

There's there's a school of thought about the passenger pigeon that um they were actually they their populations exploded just prior to European settlement of North America. But after that first Colombian contact, and the idea is that if you go and look around a bunch of like Native American sites, pre Columbian Native American sites, you don't find that many passenger pigeon bones. There. Some there, but there's not a lot, and there's certainly not enough to suggest that there were

billions of these things at the time. So this idea is that after Colombian contact and disease and violence wiped out and spread through North American and wiped out large like of the Native Americans living there, the passenger pigeon was no longer preyed upon by the Native Americans, and so their population boomed. So in a way, all these white settlers who hunted this thing into extinction are kind of off the hook because it was their fault anyway

that led to this boom and population. Well, other scholarships says like, no, you're ignoring a bunch of sites. It's probably not the case. White European settlers of North America probably did destroy to extinction a a perennially large population of birds in North America. You know what they call that? What a cautionary tale? Oh yeah, that sounds familiar. I've heard that before. So there are some naturalists and scientists and biologists now that they think they can bring back

the passenger pigeon. But should we? But should we? And there's a bunch of schools of thought. There are some conservation let's say, well, if we start bringing back extinct species, maybe we won't protect the ones that are near extinction because people, you know, as I guess robustly, because people say, well, you can bring them back anyway, I don't know about that. Well, I mean, what's what's the problem though? If you think about it, like, what what does it matter to the

passenger pigeon? It doesn't know? Right? Well, yeah, I mean there are none. Well that's the point. Yeah that a lot of people say, leave it be. That's one thing. But also, if you bring back a passenger pigeon, you are bringing back something whose heritage has been interrupted and therefore all of that that collective memory that's passed down from one generation to the next has ended already. Right, So who's going to teach that passenger pigeon how to

be a passenger pigeon? It may not know, It may be a monster, a monster, It may kill entire families of people. Well, thank god we have all those tiny pigeon hammers, you know. Uh so, yeah, there's a lot of schools of thought. Bring it back. It wouldn't know what to do, or it might just pick up and be fine. Who knows. All right, so we've talked about we've covered passenger pigeons. Now the sad extinction of the passenger pigeon. All those other pigeons talked about, Cameras on

the bellies, messages on backpacks and feet. Those are homing messenger pigeons. I'm covering. I'm going back over everything here we've covered. I don't think even think we mentioned drug traffickers. Supposedly in Afghanistan and in in Pakistan, um carry ten grams of heroin each heat and they've been used, so people

have been misusing and using and abusing these birds for millennia. Supposedly, the average UM messenger pigeon can carry up to two and a half ounces of something if it's balanced correctly on its backpack. What two and a half ounces? So these these things are being treated like royalty if all they have to carry is ten grams of heroine, Yeah, that's that's nothing. And when they show up. There's frequently

just nine grams, you know what I mean. So this uh city pigeons just your average pigeon that everyone seems to detest. Not everyone, Some people love these things and feed them. Uh in France, in Paris, I believe it's illegal to feed them, um because you know, you got a Trafalgar Square in other places like at and they can be so vast that you can't even walk. So when you feed them, they congregate, and so that's a problem. So they've outlawed it in a lot of place. Put everywhere,

they're dirty, they spread disease. It's all very true, yes, and there have been some cases of legal cases in lawsuits because of pigeons. There was one in France where there was an American woman there feeding like twenty five pounds of feed a day in Paris and it was already I think outlawed in Paris. Yeah, she had been fine nineteen times and nice, so I guess she like was like, I'll go to Paris then so I can

feed the pigeons. She's like the creepy pigeon feeding lady from Mary Poppins, remember her, Now feed the birds tup into bag tupping tupping. Remember that was like five man. A lot of that movie was creepy, not as creepy as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which is like one of the most disturbing children's movies. All this. The bad guy is one of the skin guys her. Yeah, he was pretty scary. Yeah. And by the way, Gon with the

wind was color not colorized. We goofed that one what was colorized, and that never was color well, tid turn her colorized some things, but that wasn't one of them, right, But what was one of them? I don't know. We could go back and look. It just looked funny, that's all I remember. It's probably Citizen King. We'll hear about an email. Huh, Yeah, it wasn't Citizen King. Um. So this French I'm sorry, this American woman feeding all these French pigeons. This other lady is on a park bench.

She's ticked off because there's all these pigeons everywhere. She gets up, she tries to kick these things. She tears her stockings and scratches her limbs up, her legs up apparently, and takes this lady to court and they threw out the case or they lost the case because the judge basically said, you don't know how to kick a pigeon without getting hurt. That's your fault, certainly not the American lady's fault. The other lawsuit, oh, there was again in France.

The French like to sue people for pigeon related stuff. Um, there's a woman who is living in an apartment in a building a couple of floors above a store, furniture store, and she would feed pigeons. Apparently the pigeon poop was so bad that the store owner was saying it was driving customers away, like all over the window window, or like on the ground and on the door knob or whatever,

keeping people from coming to his store. So we sued the woman, but the woman's lawyer apparently demonstrated that the store owner couldn't prove that the mess came from the pigeons that this lady was feeding. Could have been any pigeon. Yeah, that's a dicey one. I guess we could finish here with, um a couple of instruction aals what to do if you find a homing pigeon. Yeah, I have to say my favorite pigeon now is the homing pigeon. Yeah, I

think they're great. They don't they they They sure carry a message if you want, and then I'll be a messenger pigeon. But at heart, I'm just a homing pigeon. I just want to go home. I want to hang out and do my heroine, you know. So. Uh, here's here's some advice, UM on what to do if you find a stranded homing pigeon. UM. Number one, give it water. That's the number one thing. Yeah. And don't force feet at water like I did when I killed that bird. No, no,

because you don't want to drown it. Put it in a dish, like a one inch deep dish. Yeah, and don't overwater it like your yard. Right, you could just bring the pigeon to my yard and let it drink from my flooded lawn. So let it drink on its own in a one inch deep container. UM, offer it some food. Say you're hungry. Yeah, And you might say I don't have pigeon food. Yes you do if you have rice, um, pop popcorn? Uh, what else, buck wheat, barley,

canary seed, any of that stuff. Say you're hungry, you're thirsty, how you doing? And then again, just put the stuff out for the pigeon to enjoy and choose on his or her own whether he or she wants to do this. Next thing you do is say how's the temperature in for you? Are you're feeling good? You want to scar? It's uh, it's really cold. It's maybe let's warm it up a little. It's really warm, let me cool it down. Yeah. I think they tend to prefer temper slightly yeah, on

the cooler side of temperate. Um. And then they also like to be able to see. But you want to keep them in a place that's safe away from like dogs and cats, but also in in in like a box or something, So a box of the screen over it, a dog kennel with the kennel door closed, um, something like that, and with maybe some straw, a blanket something that it can just hang around in. And again some seed and some water and what. You just do this for like two days, right, Yeah. After a day or two,

you say how you feeling, Are you rested? Are you comfortable? Just getting the food in? Beaby, Um, it's time for you to go home. And then you just get your timing little hammer out. Don't make me use this, you do. You just release the homing pigeon and that little dude or lady um should find his or her way home. Like you can bet on it and say, hey, thanks for the stay. That was great. Well that's what the

pigeon would say to you. If that pigeon says that to you, you go catch it again and make some money off of it, because most pigeons can't do that, like Michigan j bullfrog. So uh with um again. Homing pigeons are my favorite. And if if you find one and it decides not to leave you, um, you have yourself a homing pigeon as a pet. That's right. You can also buy them if you're into homing pigeons and

raise them yourself. And when you do, you can train them to do all sorts of neat stuff, but mostly you can train them to race and fly very long distances. And there's a really neat um tried and true technique for training homing pigeons and it's basically all just food based. Yeah. So they have their nests, like training any animal, they have their home base and this is where they stay, they spend most of the time. This is where they eat, and you can take them elsewhere. Hundreds of miles away

if you like. But they say you should start off with just like twenty miles time out something like that, and create like another roost somewhere at a friend's house or um out in a field that you have permission to use. You know, make sure you have permission to use the field, and you create a roost and you um set up food there too. Let the pigeon hang out,

spend some time there. If you want the pigeon to go back home, probably all you have to do is release it from the second roost, and it'll want to go back home. But a sure fire way of doing that is to remove its food right in that second second roost sounds mean, and then well it'll be like, well I want some food, I'm gonna fly home. And it flies home and it gets to eat its food,

and you um. Any pigeon roosts, any homing pigeon roost has a trap door that the pigeon can get into, but it can't get back out unless you let it out. But they can so they can come home and get in whenever they want, so they always have food. But if you want him to go to the second roost, point B, you just take their food away at home, and they'll say, I know another place to go get food, and I'm gonna fly to it now. Once you get that down a few times, you can keep moving that

roost further and further out. They're gonna find it. And if you say tell a friend that if they hang out at the second roots will get a special message. You can attach like a little backpack to your home and pigeons and release it and it'll delight your friend with whatever message you said. This is something I could actually see you doing in like retirement. Well, a lot of people do. Did you see that list of famous people who love pigeons raised pigeons? No, I didn't, but

I know Mike Tyson is one of them. Apparently he's following a big tradition of boxers who raised pigeons. George Foreman, Marvelous, Marvin Hagler, boxers who raise pigeons to all these people on this list, Yeah, Chaccy from Choccy and Charge, he uh, he raised pigeons, Charles and Charge, Terry Bradshaw, Elvis Presley, Who's who's that? I'm just kidding, h Charles Darwin Barney apparently from from It says here he's the big purple

dinosaur in Sesame Street. That seems a little confused, But I guess Barney raised pigeons, Lee Marvin, you know what we should do is pick out the least likely person to be a pigeon. I think you just said it. Who Lee Marvin? Yeah, you might be right. Actually, you know the um the I would like to see The Birdman of Alcatraz again. That was a great movie. Jimmy smits what he's been doing. But yeah, I guess so some of these makes sense, Like Paul Newman and Joined Woodward.

That seems like a totally thing that they would have done together. There was a riveting moment at the end of the Pigeons episode where Chuck and Josh just that they're read quietly on Mike Tony Curtis. I think Lee Marvin's least likely. You think, yeah, all right, you got anything else? No, I don't think I do. Well, now that you can tell the difference between a homing pigeon, a messenger pigeon, a carrier pigeon, and a passenger pigeon,

you should up pretty good about yourself. Uh. And if you need to brush up on this confusing stuff, you can type the word pigeon into the search bart how stuff works dot Com and it will bring up who knows what? That's right? Uh? And since I said who knows what, it's time for a listener. Now, all right, this is uh, I'm gonna call this Kepler planet follow up. Um. Hey guys, in one aspect of Kepler planets, you did not mention we can only infer other planets if their

orbital plane is aligned with our view of it. Uh. If the stars planet system is off tilt with respect to us, we won't be able to infer its existence. Yet. Consider the North Star Hilaris. It's kind of perpendicular to the it's kind of perpendicular to the Solar System. Well, not really, but close enough. If Polaris Polaris had a planet with intelligent life with Kepler like technology, they could view our Sun, but they wouldn't detect any light variations

or wobble. Consider how many planets we found, now, consider how many we can't possibly find keiving current technology. It's because of the tilt. I mean they say that supposedly. Remember forty billion Earth like planets in the Milky Way alone. That's what we suspect so even more than that, maybe, says Jim from the Garden State. I don't know why I said it, like Massachusetts, the Garden State. Uh, New Jersey. I think that's how they're talking New Jersey. I lived there,

power so that was your jersey. No, that wasn't my jersey. Let's hear it. Come on, come on, see now I'm doing it. Thanks Jim in New Jersey. Uh, if you want to point out something we should have mentioned but didn't, we always love being corrected. It's one of our things. Uh. We also love hooking ourselves up to car batteries. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff

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