– How did pigeon post work in the old days?
In: 57
Pigeons have natural homing abilities – they will instinctively return to their nests, even from great distances away.
If you want to send a message to Building A, you’d capture and cage a pigeon from Building A and take it with you. When you wanted to send a message, you’d attach it to the pigeon and release it. The pigeon would return to its coup on Building A, where the message would be retrieved.
~~Passenger~~ Carrier pigeons will always return to their roost. No matter where in the world you take them.
So you start breeding the pigeons in the post offices of major cities. So now all the pigeons raised there will know to return there. You put them in a cage marked “London” or “Dublin” or wherever the bird was raised, and you ship the bird out to like Rome or wherever. Then when they need to send a message from Rome to London, they write a letter, tie it to the bird, and let the bird go. The bird will leave Rome and fly home to London. Once it gets home to the London post office the mail attendant takes the letter and sends the letter on it’s way. The bird can then be put back in a cage and shipped to another city for use again.
Although pigeon is delicious, so apparently there was a problem of mail pigeons being hunted for food. So it was pretty unreliable as a means of communication. Fast, for sure. But unreliable.
EDIT: Carrier pigeon, not passenger pigeon. Two different breeds of pigeon.
I have an uncle who races pigeons, which operate on the same principles as carrier pigeons.
When the pigeons are very young, he starts taking them a short distance away from their nest – like a few meters. They get used to walking back to their nest. Keep increasing the distance – take them next door, then down the street, then a kilometer away, then across town. At first, they’re walking back, but then they need to fly back. They get very used to returning to their nest every time. Eventually, you’re taking them to the next town, and farther, and they return home.
In the case of a carrier pigeon, or racing pigeons today, eventually you’re packing up your pigeon(s) to take on a long journey. You can tie a message for your family to them, let them go, and they will fly that message home. You can’t send a message anywhere you want, but you can send a message home from wherever you are – as long as you have a pigeon from home.
For pigeon races, lots of folks will bring their pigeons to a certain location (could be several hundred kilometers away their homes), start a timer, and release them. Then you have to hop in your car and get home before the pigeons do. The individual flocks each return to their own homes. When the pigeons arrive, you stop the timer. Each owner does the math to calculate how fast their pigeons flew (since they’re all flying different distances). It works on the honor system.
One time, my uncle’s flock returned home from a race missing a few birds, but with a few birds that didn’t belong to him (the birds have ID tags). He called the owner of birds that didn’t belong to him (who lived in a different state) and sure enough he was missing a few birds, but also had my uncles birds in his flock! It turned out that the flocks were racing in completely different races, but had crossed paths at some point, and a few birds got mixed up and went home with the wrong group.
You can think of a carrier pigeon as a little capsule that stays attached to its home by a looooong, imaginary rubber band.
When you travel away from home, you take some of those pigeons that are attached to your home along with you. As you travel, those imaginary rubber bands stretch, but don’t break.
When you need to send a message home, you take a letter, attach it to the pigeon, and release it. When released, the imaginary rubber band snaps the pigeon and the message all the way back home, where people at home can find it and read it. At the time, this was much faster than any other practical means of sending messages.
Pigeons were not carrying messages back and forth like the owls in Harry Potter, if that was the idea in your head. Each pigeon was a single-use, one-way message transfer.
You can do two-way carrier pigeon communication, but it would mean taking pigeons from both ends and physically transporting them to the opposite end ahead of time. You could always keep a stock of moved pigeons at each location, prepped and ready to send messages at a moment’s notice, and have dedicated pigeon transporters resetting pigeons in the meantime. You’d still be sending people back and forth on foot for this, meaning they could also carry messages if needed. In this situation the usage of pigeons would be purely for burst speed. You’d save them for the most important messages that need to get somewhere FAST.
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