Today, pigeons are everywhere. Also known as rock doves, they can be found in towns and cities all over the world and are native to every continent other than Antarctica. They flock in our parks, nest among our rooftops and lay siege to our bins. Such is their ubiquity that they go almost completely unnoticed by most people.
But it hasn’t always been this way. There was a time when pigeons were a prized object of the elite, associated with esoteric hobbies like racing and fancying (breeding). They also used to feature regularly in people’s diets: ‘squab meat’ was a vital protein source for rural communities in Europe as far back as 60 AD. In the past, pigeons also provided humans with an airborne postal service, carrying important messages over land and sea. Only relatively recently have they developed the unfortunate status as ‘rats with wings’ – vermin that plague neighbourhoods from Shanghai to Chicago.
This humble creature is more than meets the eye. Pigeons can teach us something about civilisation and about the relationship between information technology and economics. Every rock dove you see today is the product of a long and winding journey of both human and animal activity. Pigeons also represent a changing world: while many technologies have come and gone, they can leave behind a lasting imprint both on our world and the way we live. From our plates to our post boxes to our parks, pigeons and people share a fascinating history.
Home is where the dovecote is
Our connection with pigeons goes back several millennia. One of the earliest records of domesticated rock doves is from the Ancient Egyptian city of Amarna. Archaeologists have uncovered 2000-year-old remains of dovecote-like structures along the Nile basin, and ornamental stone carvings dating back to around 1350 BC depict images of pigeons being released from cages and then returning home,(see Figure 1). This is one of our first indications of ‘homing’ – the practice of releasing birds and allowing them to fly back to a chosen location.
Figure 1: Egyptian ceiling fragment depicting pigeons in flight (circa 1390–1352 BC)
Source: The Metropolitan Museum (public access archive)
This unassuming grey bird also has a sporting heritage. Pigeon racing was a competitive event at the Ancient Olympics, and the results of other contests (like discus, sprinting or archery, for example) were also announced via carrier pigeon. Both as competitors and messengers, rock doves were a regular feature in sports competitions thousands of years ago.
Both these examples point to pigeons’ seemingly unique attributes of speed and navigation. Yet, many birds have excellent orientation capabilities. They can cover vast distances before returning to roost at exact locations, often having been away from their nests for months or even years at a time. At the most extreme, there is the Arctic tern, which travel 90,000 km from pole to pole every year, from Greenland to the Weddell Sea. Pigeons cannot cover such distances.
Nor are they the hardiest travellers. Bar-headed geese migrate over the Himalayas each autumn, flying from Mongolia to India. During this voyage they reach altitudes of 7,000 metres, where the oxygen density is ten times lower than at sea level. This is an astonishing feat, and one that experts are still unable to understand fully. The journey of the bar-headed goose defies current scientific logic.
Pigeons on the other hand do not do anything particularly extraordinary. So, what made them so popular thousands of years ago? Perhaps it is their simple skill of reliably getting home that makes them so useful. A compass-like magnetic sensor in their beaks, together with olfactory navigation (i.e., ‘seeing by smelling’) and a keen eye for landmarks means rock doves can consistently fly back to wherever it is they consider to be their nest. And as monogamous breeders that co-parent their young, pigeons are genetically pre-disposed to be good at getting back to roost safely. Although they aren’t traversing the widest oceans or soaring above the highest mountains, they do have a keen nose for home.
This, it turns out, is a much more useful feature from a human perspective. Domestication is rarely without purpose, and pigeons’ ability to travel back to a chosen point was something mankind was able to exploit for their own gain. They are also small, cheap to rear, and relatively docile. Practices that began in Ancient Egypt and Greece developed into increasingly complex tasks over time. In each case, rock doves and their impressive ‘internal sat navs’ were able to help people solve a variety of interesting challenges.
To protect and to serve
It’s 1850, and the German-born entrepreneur, Paul Reuter has a problem. He needs to relay stock market news from Brussels back to his company headquarters in Aachen (in modern-day West Germany). There is currently no telegraph network linking the two cities, meaning updates from the Paris stock exchange are slow to arrive on Reuter’s desk. As the head of his own news agency, this isn’t acceptable. Delayed data means missed profits.
His solution? Pigeons. While the 76-mile telegraph line was under construction, Reuter sent a flock of 45 homing pigeons to Brussels each day via train. Messages detailing asset prices were attached to the birds’ legs and flown back to Aachen in just a couple of hours – far faster than any train or carriage could relay the information. This meant that Reuter, from whom the modern-day media company takes its name, could stay ahead of the story and deliver financial updates to his customers quickly. The fast and reliable transmission of information was, and still is, the core business model of Reuters News. For a short time at least – the telegraph line was completed in 1851 – pigeons were at the heart of this.
Pigeons have also been devoted public servants. The ‘pigeon post’, as it soon became known, was used extensively during both WW1 and WW2. In 1918 a messenger pigeon called Cher Ami (which means ‘dear friend’ in English) was awarded the French Croix de guerre for his heroic service. Cher Ami delivered dozens of critical messages for the US Army Signal Corps during the Meuse–Argonne offensive, flying hundreds of miles even while badly injured. And during WW2, the British Army used around 250,000 birds to transmit critical strategic information. In 1944, for example, a pigeon called Paddy was charged with delivering news of the D-Day landing, flying back from Normandy to Hampshire in under five hours. Paddy was awarded the Dickin Medal for his services to the Allied Forces.
But it’s not all straightforward gallantry. Pigeons can also be found in the so-called ‘shadow economy’. There have been reports of criminal organisations using rock doves to deliver to drugs, mobile phones and other contraband into prisons in Brazil. In 2009 guards at the Danilio Pinheiro prison in Sorocaba found a pigeon with a small mobile phone attached to its leg. A gang had been trying to smuggle the device inside the prison walls to help one of the inmates communicate with external co-conspirators.
In each case, the little birds’ keen navigation skills and reliable speed was an asset to humans. From delivering financial news to performing military operations to aiding South American criminal cartels, pigeons and people seem to work well together.
Communication is key
Economic progress and communication technology are closely linked. The printing press, the telephone and the internet are all hailed as revolutionary technologies that helped propel economic growth forward. Countries and firms that have mastered speedy and accurate communication have often outperformed their peers. For example, research shows that in East Asia, countries which with high levels of internet connectivity achieved significant positive growth. Similarly, both landlines and mobile phones are ‘highly capable’ of promoting economic development across Asia (Kurniawati, 2021).
Similarly, evidence from the United States suggests that increasing broadband deployment can have tangible positive effects on the wider economy. Not only can it translate into higher productivity, but it also helps create new jobs and facilitate economic development in rural areas (Bertschek et al., 2016). In each case, reducing the monetary and time costs associated with transmitting information can have a positive impact on an economy. In business, time is almost always of the essence.
And this is where pigeons can tell us something. The telegraph, the telephone and the internet are in part iterations of an old idea: they are ways to move information from A to B. That could be from Normandy to Hampshire, from Brussels to Aachen, or across the sand-swept streets of Ancient Amarna. Human beings can make economic gains from the speedy transmission of data, and for centuries pigeons were an excellent solution to this requirement.
Dove to dust
But what about the latest chapter of our story so far? How did pigeons go from being a key communication technology, used by news agencies, the military and criminals alike, to being seen as nothing more than a mundane urban pest. At what stage did rock doves become dirty ‘winged rats’ in the eyes or their human former colleagues? It’s a startling fall from grace.
There are two critical factors. First is their proliferation. Over centuries of domestication – for food, homing or otherwise – many pigeons escaped captivity. As a species, they are unfussy when it comes to choosing a nest and are highly productive breeders. A single female can produce 4-8 chicks per year without much difficulty, and new fledglings are ready to leave the roost after just 30-35 days. This means that once a few have escaped, populations can multiple rapidly. On top of this, modern urban environments mimic the birds’ natural cliff-side habitat (i.e., the ‘rock’ in rock doves). This means that feral pigeon colonies find it relatively easy to flourish in towns and cities, settling in rooftops, gutters and archways,
There are consequences to their swelling ranks. To put it bluntly, pigeons poo a lot. A single bird produces up to 11kg of waste each year, slathering parks, pavements and playgrounds in acidic excrement. In fact, across the United States pigeon droppings cause $1.1 billion worth of damage each year. This does their reputation few favours.
Second, there is the wider case of technology change. At the same time as their urban populations were booming, pigeons were becoming less and less useful to humans. While small flocks were still deployed in certain circumstances (such as military combat), for the most part the pigeon post was wiped out by the development of the telephone in the late 19th century. Not many people were eating squab meat anymore. This meant that their place in society, from a human perspective at least, had shifted from useful to harmful.
The final known pigeon-based postal service was retired in 2002 (in Odisha, India). The reason? Reliable broadband internet had arrived, and airborne avian mail was no longer a necessity. Technologies come and go, and how we communicate information is no different. The wheel of change grinds on.
But not all is lost. Just as largely redundant canal networks still criss-cross the UK, marking the contemporary landscape with traces of a foregone era, the presence of pigeons is partly an echo of a different economic age. These remarkable but underappreciated navigators may no longer play a major role in the daily workings of society, but that does not mean they are unimportant. The world may have moved on, but in their own small way pigeons helped us get to where we are. One last message, it seems.
Author: Charlie Meyrick
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