How were birds (pigeons, ravens, etc.) trained to deliver messages back in the day?
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Carrier pigeons knew where their home was, and if you took one in a cage and carried it with you somewhere else, it would fly back home when given the chance.
So you would basically take the bird with you, attach a letter to it, let It go, and someone back at where the bird’s home was would get that letter.
They know where their home is. So if you have a base in City A, City B, City C, and you need to use a bird to send a message, you need 3 different birds. The message for your base in City A gets carried by the City A bird, and so forth.
They were trained to see a place as home, by raising them there. Then they were carted off to a different place in cages. From there, they’d tie a message to the bird and let them loose. The bird goes home, message reaches wherever bird’s home is. The bird then needs to get carted off again before it can be used again.
Birds know how to get back to their nests. Get birds from places you want to send messages. Tie messages for the places to the birds who lived there and they will fly the messages back.
Pigeons are pretty dumb birds but they’re very good at one specific thing – flying home.
They can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and will fly home no matter where you release them.
You just need to make sure your messenger pigeon has decided that “home” is also where your generals are located.
You can’t quickly retrain them to fly somewhere else, it’s a one-way system. Soldiers bring the birds out into the combat theater and release them to relay messages back to command.
Note that ravens have not historically been used to carry messages the way carrier pigeons were. GoT decided ravens were way cooler than pigeons.
It wasn’t necessary to train them. People figured out that the birds settled into a place and decided it was home. If you took them away from home and then let them go, they just flew back home. So, the trick was just to raise a bunch of birds in a place so they considered it “home” – say a tower or little hut in a fort. Then, you could send people out with birds in cages that you knew would fly back to that place.
You could send messages 2-way by having a bird hut at two spots and shipping birds in cages by cart.
People still train homing pigeons and there are competitions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_racing
Basically they are a specific type of pigeon and they practice by dropping them at random locations further and further from home and feed them treats when they find their way home.
They can also train them to return to more than one location.
Pigeons actually don’t need training. Pigeons always return to the place they’re born, and always know where they’re going.
Say you’re sending your army out. You give them a few pigeons from the castle’s coup.
When they wanna tell the crown that they won the battle, they write a note, grab a pigeon by the leg, tie the note on, and let the bird fly home.
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