On display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History is a stuffed one-legged pigeon, honouring one of the most remarkable relationships ever forged between people and birds – that of pigeons helping soldiers during wars.
That pigeon, Cher Ami, although hit by enemy fire on his 12th mission in World War l, still delivered a message that saved 200 American troops from German fire. During World War II another 200 Americans were saved by a note-carrying pigeon that survived Japanese bombardment in New Guinea. Thousands of pigeons were released from trenches, tanks, ships and seaplanes, often serving as the surest means of communication from the front line, and often saving lives, despite enemy marksmen trained to take them out. The US had a unit dedicated to the training and deployment of pigeons, overseen during World War II by a Chief Pigeoneer. Patriotic pigeon keepers provided tens of thousands of their best birds.
Homing pigeons have a very long history of service, reportedly carrying messages for the Moghuls, Crusaders, Romans, Saracens, Egyptian pharaohs and ancient Persians. The Reuters media service started out as pigeons carrying stock market prices to and from Brussels. Santa Catalina Island had a pigeon service taking mail to Los Angeles in the 1890s, and Orissa, India, had a police pigeon service that lasted until 2004. All of this was possible because pigeons, when taken somewhere new, even inside a dark box, can reliably find their way home.
Pigeons deserve our respect, but their status suffers when we see them in cities soiling building ledges and jostling for popcorn and crumbs. Many war pigeons were awarded medals for bravery by several nations, but we don’t think of heroes when we see pigeons in parks.
Psychologists take pigeons seriously for their own reasons, respecting them as birds that excel at visual categorisation. Domestic pigeons in experiments have distinguished letters of the alphabet, different emotions on human faces, paintings by Picasso and Monet, and even breast cancer tumours on scans. In one test, categorising coloured rectangles on a screen, pigeons left university students far behind. Brains wired to detect tiny seeds on gritty ground do well on another kind of flat surface – the screens used in experiments. Pigeon skills are unusual for birds that – unlike parrots and ravens – aren’t lauded for general intelligence.
The words ‘pigeon’ and ‘dove’ overlap in meaning, which explains how the domestic pigeon can have as its forebear a species called the rock dove (Columbia livia), found on rough slopes in Europe, Asia and North Africa. Many birds are serious about migration, but rock doves seldom travel more than 20 miles between seasons, and most are sedentary, leaving us to wonder why homing pigeons have what it takes to reach home across a thousand miles of unknown country. Homers are bred to excel, but no one has bred a parrot or canary or duck that returns, so their basic skill set can’t be put down to breeding. Nor can an eye for cancer scans and painting styles. Domestic pigeons actually have smaller brains than their wild counterparts. Some of the world’s 340 or so pigeon species do journey long distances and the rock dove may have skills inherited from an ancestor that travelled more. Homing may be a default pigeon skill. Pigeons were domesticated in the first place for eating, and their large breast muscles, which recommended them as food, suit long journeys by powering strong flight.
Charles Darwin was enthusiastic about pigeons because the profusion of breeds concocted by fanciers lent support to his theory of evolution. His colleague Alfred Russel Wallace had a different kind of interest, aroused by his years in the Indo-Malayan archipelago. Wallace had noticed that pigeons “achieved their maximum development, as regards beauty, variety, and number of species”, in the region around New Guinea.
This imposing island and the lands around it, including Australia, give the word ‘pigeon’ a grandiose meaning. While most street pigeons are as drab as businessmen in suits, the fruit-doves of this region come dressed as if for a mardi gras, in purples, yellows and other fearless colours. The vivid rainforest fruits they eat have given them an appreciation for colours on each other. New Guinea boasts the world’s largest pigeon, nearly equal to a turkey – the Victoria crowned pigeon – which has lacy head plumes standing in for loud colours. Only in New Guinea and Australia do pigeons indulge in head ornaments, recorded in names such as ‘crested pigeon’, ‘topknot’ and ‘plumed pigeon’.
Wallace surmised that New Guinea had served as the cradle from which the world’s pigeons emerged. ‘Magnificent’ and ‘remarkable’ were words he used for some he encountered in this pigeon ‘metropolis’. Today’s thinking is that pigeons emerged somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, although there is no certainty about where. The oldest fossils have been found in Australia.
We ought not take pigeons for granted. To pigeonhole them as urban scroungers does them an injustice. Australian bird photographer Leila Jeffreys has taken it on herself to show them as they truly are, as beings with the power to surprise. The striking pigeons of New Guinea and Australia are her opportunity to compel our attention. They are pigeons as we are not used to seeing them, as if our conventional friends, to surprise us, have decked themselves up in party gear.
Everything alive is essentially a mystery, and pigeons, with their extraordinary mental and physical powers, are more mysterious than most. Scientists testing their navigation have found them to be multi-skilled, able to return home by evaluating landscape smells, the position of the sun, planetary magnetism, the lines marked by highways, and probably infrasound. Pigeons have returned home after being transported to somewhere new while anaesthetized and sealed inside a metal container on a rotating turntable. Pigeons were domesticated thousands of years ago, long before chickens or ducks, which makes them the bird on earth to which we have the longest close relationship. Pigeons matter.