How were birds (pigeons, ravens, etc.) trained to deliver messages back in the day?
In: 4193
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.
They weren’t.
The specific types of birds they used weren’t trained to take messages.
Rather, these birds wanted to return to where they were born, their home.
So, you would birth some carrier pigeons, then, take them to a place you wanted to receive messages from (or, someone else would take them to a place they wanted to be able to send messages from).
Then, when you want to send a message, you select a pigeon born in that place, attach the message, then, let it go. It flies home, and your message is delivered.
They weren’t trained at all
They were fed regularly in their home. They were happy at home. Like horses and dogs, they’d travel great distances to get home.
A stranger would take them and ride away. When he needed to send a message he’d tie it to the bird and release it. The bird would fly home.
This Colorado rafting outfit still uses them to this day to get the camera sd cards back before the rafters get there. https://www.shoprma.com/pigeon-express/
I know im way too late to the party but as someone who raises and competes with homing pigeons i feel like i can give a pretty good answer. All pigeons are born with a homing instinct, hence the name. Unlike some answers said, they do need to be trained to be able to find their home. You cant just take a 6 month old pigeon basically any distance at all and expect it to come back home, the bird has to be trained and know where its home/source of food is. When i raise a flock of my young birds i always have to start by simply letting them out to explore around the house. Once they start flying after a few times out you have to be very patient with them and let them out dozens of times until they stay in the air for a couple hours and eventually start flying further and further away from home and coming back home when they are done. After they master that, thats when you can start boxing them and taking them further and further away. I usually start by taking them 1,3,5,7,10,15,20,30 etc. miles from the house. A well trained pigeon will return home from 500 miles or more. And no there is no definitive proven answer how exactly they are able to do that.
Latest Answers