How were birds (pigeons, ravens, etc.) trained to deliver messages back in the day?
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Raise a pigeon from birth in a castle rookery. Feed it, pet it, and bonus points if you let it breed and lay/sire eggs.
Now take the pigeon a little bit away from the castle and release it. It will fly back to the castle despite never having travelled far outside the castle.
Now take it a bit farther out and do the same thing. It still goes back, especially if it has offspring that it needs to take care of.
Over hundreds of years, people noticed that pigeons would always fly back to where they were nurtured no matter where they were. And pigeons are really good flyers too, so that’s an extra benefit. They didn’t really know how they could always find their way back, but they knew it was extremely fast and reliable.
Today, we know that pigeons and other birds have great eyesight and can sense earth’s magnetic field to find their way home, along with recognizing landmarks.
Now imagine that you are in war and are far away from your castle. You want to deliver a message back quickly. It could be about anything, but let’s suppose you wanted to warn the soldiers at the castle that the enemy was coming to attack them so they need to be ready. Thanks to the pigeons you carried with you, you can do that. You strap a small cylindrical saddle on the pigeon’s back, put your message inside, and you set it free. It will do the rest.
A common question people ask is how pigeons can go to seemingly random places in the middle of nowhere and deliver messages to people. The answer is they mostly can’t. Pigeons don’t travel to and from places back and forth, and certainly not to specific people. They only know how to travel to a specific fixed point (their home) and nothing more. During war, you had to manually carry pigeons and their cages with your caravan on horseback, and then release them when you wanted them to send a message. You couldn’t send the pigeon out to find, for example, the other commander of your moving army.
For thousands of years before the arrival of the telegraph which ran on morse code and radio waves (which delivered messages at the speed of light), a bird with paper was the fastest way to get a message across. And similarly, for an even longer amount of time, the fastest way to travel on land before the arrival of the train and automobile was literally a dude sitting on a horse.
After the abandonment of feudalism in Europe, the early mail system was introduced which was very similar to the Pony Express in the United States (horses carrying packages). Carrier pigeons started to decrease in popularity because although they were faster, they weren’t all that intelligent and couldn’t carry much weight or deliver to specific people. In modern times, carrier pigeons and similar birds are trained in competitions for fun.
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