How does pigeon letter courier work? How can they precisely know who they should send their letters to?
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They don’t. They just go home.
That’s how messenger pigeons, or homing pigeons, work. They are bred and trained to fly back home to their roost. This is done by repeatedly taking them a bit further and further away each time.
But then after a while they can navigate back to their roost from anywhere from dozens to sometimes hundreds of miles away. Though it is also possible for them to get lost.
So they don’t navigate to a new place, they just go home, we aren’t really sure how they do it, but that’s what they do.
Edit: for all the people saying “they have a built in compass, they can sense the magnetic field” for how they find their way home. Yes, that is a leading theory, but it is not proven and it is still debated. And really that is only half of the theory, because while a compass can tell you north, south, east, and west, unless you know where you are on the map relative to where you want to go, knowing which was is north doesn’t really help you. So the theory is really a Map and Compass theory, in which we really don’t know what the “map” part is or how the birds keep track of it.
So, messenger pigeons are only useful really for sending messages back home or back to base. So if you are a soldier back in WW1, you job may have been to carry cages of these pigeons so you could strap messages to them for them to fly back to base with, letting base know what was happening at the front.
For two place to communicate back and forth, they would both need pigeons that are from each other’s “home” to be able to do that.
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