August 18, 2015 • 48 mins
Pigeons can get a little confusing. Passengers, messengers, carriers, homing - the list goes on. But when it comes down to it, they're all variations of the same smart bird with a knack for getting home to roost. Learn about these clever creatures in today's episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.
That was not Jerry, And this is stuff you should know.
(00:25):
I love that we have a new trend here of
starting our animal centric podcasts with impressions of that animal,
because you did your what I thought was a dolphin,
but it was a bad and I just did a pigeon,
which that was a pretty good pigeon. Well, come on,
cool goes again. He just blew me away with your
pige in New York pigeon. Cool. I'm cooling here, Yeah,
(00:49):
I'm going here. How's it going. I feel ashamed all
of the stuff. Uh, we've gotten a lot of requests
for um messenger pigeons we have over the years, and
you said I'm going to heed the call and put
together a nice little conglomerate of articles on it. And
I thought it was super interesting and a bit confusing
(01:12):
in terminology because as we will soon divulge, and I
guess we're about to messenger pigeons homing pigeons. Well no,
not really. Oh yeah, the same like a lot of
it is just right. I'm sorry for those. Are you
chose the two that are the same all the others
are different? Yeah, Homing pigeons and passenger peasants pigeons different,
(01:37):
different um. Carrier pigeons different than messenger pigeons, which is
very confusing. It's all just confusing. Well, it's clear through
the crud and the mare and the mock and get
to the differences between types of pigeons, because most people do.
(01:57):
When you think of a carrier pigeon, chuck, you're probably
lumping together a bunch of different pigeons into the same category.
And you would be right in a certain way, and
that most of the pigeons that we consider carrier pigeons
um are descended from rock pigeons. Yeah, we don't want
to be pigeon lumpers. No, all pigeons are different and
(02:17):
beautiful in their own way, that's right. Rock pigeons originally
named so from the rock dove I believe, which they
inhabited mountains and sea cliffs, and I think that's why
they were called rock sure, or they love poison. That'd
be glam rock pigeons hair rock hair. Rock pigeons glam rock. No,
(02:40):
not quite as glam rocks rock Glary Gary Glitter, Yeah,
and I think a little older like glam rock to
me was seventies. Hair rock was the eighties kind of
bastardization of glam rock. Not nearly as good as like
the New York Dolls. Let's say, sure, right, you know
who were way better than Gary Glitter as it turns
out in the end, that's right. Oh yeah, she's forgot
(03:02):
about that all right. Back to pigeons, we haven't even
started yet. They were all descended from rock pigeons, kind
of like do you remember a Thoroughbred horse Artum episode?
How can I forget? I love that one. Yeah, I
didn't like it that much because I was it was
dense for me. There's a lot of information there. The
(03:24):
difference between thoroughbred horses and pigeons is that there's not
that much information on pigeon legion lineages, despite the fact
that some people show them right. And this is where
we finally arrive at carrier pigeons. That's right, they are,
as this article points out, fancy pigeons and their bred
to to to show their ornamental, very weird ways. Yeah,
(03:47):
they have what's on their nose. If you look up
a true carrier pigeon, you're gonna see a lot of
pictures of just homing pigeons. But look until you find
one that looks like it has a rotten walnut on
its Now it looks like it's pecked into a tara
toma and it's come out and just stuck around the
bird's beak. Yeah, that's called a wattle, sir, wattle to
(04:12):
two words, wattle dash sir, c E r E and um.
It is a fleshy thing on the bill, and they
do say it resembles the texture of a walnut, and
that's what it starts out as they get big and
even more gross looking. Yeah, and it's at the top
of the bill, which is when you see one, uh
carrier pigeon with just one of these wattles on top
(04:34):
of its beak, You're like, that's a little weird looking.
But I've seen birds with that little growth right there before.
As they mature, these wattles start popping up all around
their beak and it's it's just growny, like they have
them beneath around the sides. It's gross. It's like a
bird only a passenger passenger lover, Fancier would love like
(04:56):
they love these things. But most people when they seem like,
oh man, look at that right. Yeah, And if you're
showing carrier pigeons like the pigeons like great, amazing waddle,
is is something to be shown off and displayed. It's
like a point of pride among the show where or
not me, Bud Fancier, I say, cover that thing up. People,
by the way, who like just kidding, who like pigeons
(05:19):
and are into showing and raising and using pigeons for
fun um are called pigeon fanciers. By the way, Yeah,
I just said that, Oh you did. Yeah, but I
didn't explain it. I just slipped it in. Okay, well,
wanting to explain it. Yeah, people are probably like, why
did Chuck just say Fancier? Who does he think he is?
What does he think he's the king in England? No,
(05:39):
but the carrier pigeon is the king of pigeons. According
to fanciers, that was not bad. Uh. Pigeons were imported
to the US from Europe in eighteen sixty, and by
eighteen seventy two the first racing clubs were formed. Apparently
Philadelphia has or probably still do or had the largest
concentration of fanciers in the late eighteen hundreds, and um,
(06:02):
racing pigeons is a really big deal. Still yeah. The
reason you can race pigeons is that rock pigeon descendants,
whether they be carrier although I don't think I think
carrier is the least strong of all of them, but
especially homing and messenger pigeons, they're really fast and they
are capable of flying their way their way over very
(06:24):
long distances, that's right, And they find their way home
because they return in general to their nest to mate.
So this is why they return home. And we'll get
to how in a bit uh later, but like how
to train them to do that? Well, how to train
them in just how you know, science has figured out
that they do this, because it's pretty remarkable. Um. So
(06:47):
they fly around forty miles per hour on average, but
can reach his high sixty and apparently a hundred to
three hundred miles is just a walk in the park
for these guys and gals. Um, they have a record.
I don't know if it's a documented record, but they've
verified that a homing pigeon named Charlie flew and fifty
(07:09):
miles from the UK to Brazil and he wasn't even
supposed to isn't that crazy? Yeah, apparently he was in
a race and um, I guess his nest was in
Brazil originally, and he figured it out and made his
way there to Brazil even though he was in a
local race at the time in England. And the nuts.
It's pretty nuts. So apparently the racing pigeons and we
(07:30):
could do I mean, there's so much on racing pigeons
that we're not even gonna get to acide for mentioning it.
But the racing homer is the specific type of pigeon
that is bred to race because the homer is the fastest,
which is ironic if you're a Simpsons fan. Oh yeah,
because Homer is not a fast guy. Yeah, you know, no,
he's really not. So. Homing pigeons are are bread specifically
(07:55):
to find their way home. I mean, they're good at
it anyway, like you said, but they select of we
breathe these things if you're going to be a fancier
to do so. And when you're when you're raising a
homing pigeon or something like that, basically what you're doing
is you're taking it to a place away from its home. Yeh,
smack it on the head right with a little tiny
hammer so they wake up. Yeah, and uh no, don't
(08:18):
do that, no pigeon, if you're ever just kidding, don't
do that. Uh. And then you release it and it
will find its way back home, and you release it
at the same time as some other ones, and whicheveryone
finds its way home first is the winner. That's racing pigeons.
But as you said, homing pigeons are really good at
finding their way home naturally, but over time they've been
selectively bread by humans to be the best of the
(08:40):
best at this, Like compared to their wild ancestors, they
make them look like utter poop. Yeah, just like your
basic rock pigeon. Yeah. Uh So let's talk a little
bit about the different theories on how they find their
way home. Um, there's some new findings and what they
generally think now is it could be a combination of
(09:02):
these things or like it seems like an everybody wins hypothesis. Yeah, basically, so, Um,
the sun could be one way that they find their
direction and just a general north south east west sort
of way when it's cloudy the Earth's magnetic field. Uh,
there's basically two different things going at work here. There's
a compass and then there's the map. And the compass
(09:23):
is just your sort of like just us. It's a
general header and the map is actually like where am
I now and where do I need to be? Yeah, well,
I'm back in New York. I'm one street and I
need to get down to the lower east side. But
the compass part is like, so that I'm right now
facing north, which means I need to turn around a
little bit and go until I'm facing east. That's right,
(09:46):
and using my map, I've figured this out. Yeah, this
one study I didn't follow up on it, the one
from Oxford that said they actually follow established roads at
some point. Do you know, did you look into that anymore? No,
I didn't see that. I wonder if that was just
like a speculation and that's been overturned, or if they
really do follow. So the fact that that we didn't
(10:07):
run into that anywhere else makes me think like it's
probably been abandoned. It seemed from what I can understand
that the two main competing, long standing, competing explanations, where
like you said, they're following magnetic lines um in the
Earth's magnetosphere, or they're following smells, tiny odor molecules that
(10:28):
they used to basically as a trail of brig crumbs
to lead them back towards their roost, their nest um.
And for a long time this was it was debated
whether this was the case or not. Um the fact
that they have such good compasses really lends a lot
of credibility to the idea that they can follow magnetic
lines and use those too to um orient themselves. And
(10:52):
there's actually this anecdote from the early eighties that really
lends a lot of support to the magnetic um theory,
and that is there was this one pigeon that was
caught around a lake in Yellowstone. And by caught, I
mean like it was seen for I think a few weeks,
like just flying in circles around this lake, which is
(11:14):
not what a home and pigeon is supposed to do. No,
they fly straight and purposeful toward home sure wherever they are. UM.
So this this naturalist apparently where'd you find this article?
I'm not sure which one this was in? Uh, Audubon
Society was one, and uh, well, well, I mean we've
got them all posted on our website. Right, Okay, So, um,
(11:35):
this naturalist who wrote this article that we're talking about,
UM got ahold of this pigeon and he took it
and cared for it and took it away from the
lake and released it. And the thing flew due east
and it was a North Carolina pigeon and it was
out in Yellowstone. So he said, you know what, this
lake area has a really weird magnetic magnetic field. It's
(11:56):
known for making compasses go hey wire. So this lends
a any decent amount of support to the magnetic line theory. Yeah, agreed,
but it's been overturned recently or at least diminished as
far as um the smell theory, right, Well, I don't
know about overturned. I think again it's like everyone wins.
I think from what I ended up with was that
(12:17):
they use all of these things when it's most beneficial,
like they'll use one. If it's like if the magnetic
field is not as strong, then they'll go to one
of the other tried and true methods like smell. Yes,
smell was another one, and then recently UM sound, specifically infrasound,
which are sound waves super low frequency that we can't
(12:40):
hear them. There's a geophysicist named John Hagstrom that cooked
up this idea, uh and published it in the Journal
of Experimental Biology, and he said, basically, he thinks that
they hear their way home, which you know, makes a
lot of sense. Yeah, And apparently this um that pigeon
back in the early piece that was around yellow Stone,
(13:02):
that lake and Yellowstone that was having a hard time. Um.
That phenomenon is called a release site bias. In some
places in the world, if you release a homing pigeon,
they're gonna have a hard time finding their way home
or else they're gonna end up getting stuck flying around
in circles. And it's generally unexplained. So it's led to
this whole sub field of study of homing pigeon maps
(13:24):
and how they do this stuff. And um, this subsonic
sound theory basically says that they follow basically sound maps. Yeah,
sort of like echo location is what it sounded like
to me with bats. Yeah, but they're just hearing. They're
not like creating a sound and listening for the echo.
They're just listening out for the sound. But they're almost
(13:45):
listening out for sound in much the same way that
they would follow, say, odorant molecules like a trail of
brick crumbs. They're listening for familiar subsonic sounds as low
as point zero five hurts. Uh, And like you said,
we create a sound map and um. He basically compared
it to the same thing that we see when we
(14:07):
look out with our eyeballs at something. Yeah, but they
can hear it, right, So they would like see their
home the way we see our home when we're driving
like up to it. Yeah, they hear their home and
they know which way to go toward it. Yeah. Yeah,
if you could see what I hear? Have you ever
seen that movie? No? Is that a lifetime movie? It
(14:27):
could have been if there was Lifetime back then, but
it was the eighties movie. Was the guy that played
the beast Master. He played a very famous blind man
who was a piano player, and it was called If
You Could See What I Hear? So I think blind
people use sound in similar ways. Was it blind Tom
the uh, the Savant? I can't remember. He's sort of
(14:50):
like a piano player, playboy type. I just remember seeing
on cable when I was a kid, and I think
Mark singer was the guy. Yeah, but I can't remember
the real guy, but he was a real die. Did
you see or hear about the Lifetime movie that um
Kristen Wig and Will Ferrell made And no one can
figure out if it was like a piece of comedy
genius or else if they were like serious or what. Well, no,
(15:12):
they figured it out. I mean they basically went to
make the movie and just said, let's just do this
as straight up as we can. But because it's us,
that'll just have that edge that you know, like Will
Ferrell being serious is one of the funniest things in
the world. So it was comedic genius. Well yeah, because
it's them. But they weren't like, let's try and make
(15:32):
this funny. They just said, let's do this as straight
as possible. I didn't know if like both of them
happened to have like a family member who needed surgery
at the same time, so they like signed on to
this project. It's pretty weird. Have you seen it? Yeah? Yeah,
I saw it, and it's it is tough because they
are hysterical but it's so straight. It's like, I don't
know how to register this. This is like like the
(15:53):
Room or something like that Wow. Wow, that was just
a bad movie that ended up being hysterical. But this
isn't much the same. I gotta see this what the
room or no, the other one? You gotta see him
both what I've seen the room? Okay, what's the what's
the lifetime movie one called? I can't remember. I guess
if you just search Will Ferrell lifetime movie, it'll come up.
(16:15):
But there's a lot of weird things. He did that
Spanish language movie, and he did that the mini series. Uh,
he takes chances. Good for him, he's in a position
to do so. H So I feel like this is
a pretty good time to take a break, don't you. Yes,
and re gather ourselves. Yes, let's do that starting now,
(16:59):
all right. So we everard basically how they find their
way home and the competing theories, and I think they
all just lived together in one big, happy family because
they haven't disproved the theories. The pigeons, Yeah, the pigeons
do too. They like each other, but I don't. I
don't think anyone has disproven anything. So at this point,
I think they're taking all comers as far as those
(17:19):
theories go. Yeah. So, and this is um not specific too.
Is it specific to homing pigeons, although it would include
messenger pigeons, wouldn't it because and carrier pigeons does it,
but not passenger pigeons. Okay, so they're all dead. The
only difference between a messenger pigeon and a homing pigeon
(17:41):
is that, Um, a messenger pigeon has something either a
two bonnuts leg or a little backpack that contains a message.
I think the backpack is the new method, and they
used to do the tube on the leg. I think
the backpack is way cuter. Yeah, it's adorable. Backpack, you can.
What I can't figure out is a difference between a
messenger pigeon and a carrier pigeon. Okay, so here's a
(18:04):
carrier pigeon is not bread for flying, it's not bread
for its homing abilities. It's not bred to race, it's
not bread to send. It's basically, um, the Pekinese of pigeons. Okay, No,
I got I got it. I'm just picturing them in
my head, got you. So carrier is confusing me because
they're not They're not actually carrying anything. No, that is
(18:24):
why it's so confusing. Of all of them, they should
not have the word carrier attached. It should be like
virtually useless pigeon with the horrible wattle on its beach.
That's the new car pigeon. Hammer to talk them on
the head. Now, that's homing pigeons. So carrier pigeons are
are for show. Got you. They're the best and show
(18:45):
of pigeons. So the homing pigeon is the one who
carries a message. Generally it's written on little tiny pieces
of thin. That's the messenger pigeon, which is a homing
pigeon that is carrying a message exactly. Yeah, that's where
we are, okay, but I mean it can get confusing.
I'm sorry to act to you know what I mean
to be. No, I think I just said a messenger pigeon,
didn't I I don't remember. Okay, let's through wine and listen.
(19:08):
At any rate, the messenger pigeon is a homing pigeon
that carries a message, and they have been around for
a long time. Egypt, the Phoenicians romans. Uh Noah, yeah,
Noah in the in the Bible. He was the first dude.
I thought those were doves. But apparently I ran across
(19:32):
a comment on it that dove and pigeon were interchangeable
back then, back in old timey aramaic days. All right,
well that makes sense. Apparently in ancient Rome when they
had chariot races that not just like a chariot race
in a stadium, but like a long chariot race over distance,
they would send um the passenger. I'm sorry, man, here
(19:55):
we go the messenger pigeons back with the news of
who won. He right, so that I attached, you know,
brutus one, this one, go tell them everybody, and I
guess an hour later they would get there and everyone
would be too drunk to realize that they cared at
that point. Genghis Khan used them. He had like a
whole system set up. Oh yeah, we've never really talked
(20:18):
about him, have we? Yeah? We have. Did we do
an episode on that? Yeah? We did, Yeah, about whether
or they killed like a million people or something. And
I can't find that episode anywhere. I'm pretty sure recovered it.
I felt like we did too. Jerry's nodding us or
either she's falling asleep in the way over and over again.
(20:38):
Uh so, yeah, Genghis Khan had a whole system across
Asia and Europe like a relay system. Pretty impressive. Germans
used them actually attached little cameras through their bellies. That
was World War One. Yeah. So the modern use of
messenger pigeons uh in warfare was actually it seems to
be started by the French and went all the way
(21:00):
up through the Vietnam War. Yeah. So there's a like
the French love using messenger pigeons in a war like setting, right, um.
And there was the Siege of Paris. The Prussians were
attacking Paris, and Paris was finally saved. There reinforcements thanks
to a group of carrier pigeons or messenger pigeons um
(21:20):
who got word that Paris was being was under siege
and uh they needed help, and help arrived and Paris
was saved. As I said, a few times Prussians were defeated,
and the pigeon was so beloved as a result that
the same guy who um created the Statue of Liberty
also created a tribute to pigeons that was that stood
(21:44):
in Paris up until warld boar World War two, when
they melted it down because they needed the medal. I
think so. So by the time World War one rolled around,
pigeons were very much established as a very useful means
of communication when all else failed. Um in war. Yeah,
apparently they're so fast that they're hard to shoot down. Uh,
(22:07):
and they get where they want to go. In the
case in France and uh, how do you pronounce it?
M A R and the Battle of the Marne, there
were seventy two pigeon lofts and as they advanced forward,
they took the loss with them. A lot of the
pigeons that were out carrying messages, Uh, we're out when
they moved the loft were out when they moved the loss.
(22:28):
And we're still able to find their lofts blind, not
knowing where these lofts ended up. Amazing, go pigeons. Uh,
there was there were laws passed during wartime. This one
Regulation twenty one A shooting homing pigeons, Killing, wounding or
molesting gross homing pigeons is punishable on the defense of
(22:49):
the realm regulations by six months imprisonment or one pounds fine.
That's that's just a fine. In France, you could be
executed for impeding, uh messenger pigeons a wartime pigeon, and
there were also rewards offered five pound rewards, Uh for
any You know, if you turn in your your friend
(23:11):
for shooting a homing pigeon, get five pounds five pounds exactly. Yeah,
so it's a big, big deal. They were dogs, apparently
two and pigeons were used heavily in wartime to carry
messages like very reliably. Um, should we tell the story
of Sheremi? How can we not? I don't see how
we could. In World War One, you mentioned that the
(23:37):
Germans were using um, uh, passenger or messenger pigeons with
camera strap to their belly for aerial reconnaissance. Right, it's
like the bats with the bombs kind of, but this
is more photography rather than incendiary destruction. Um. But the
French we're using this for um messages, for getting them
(23:58):
from the front, you know, to behind the lines HQ.
And so were the Americans too. Apparently the French used
like thirty thousand of them in World War One. Americans
had something like six hundred. But one really came through
for New York Company at the Battle of the Argonne
was October nineteen eighteen, towards the end of the war,
(24:20):
and they were trapped by as the Germans. So this
this pigeon named Jereh me Uh was released by I
think it was New York Company, right, which was surrounded
in a little low lying I don't even think you
can call it a valley. I think the author of
this New York Times article that we're getting this from
called it like a depression in the ground. And there's
(24:42):
a few hundred men who were there. It started out
as five hundred UM and they were starting to get
whittled down because they were surrounded by Germans. Even worse
than that, the American UM reinforcements had no idea where
this this New York Company was, and they were they
were showing them too, because they thought that they were
showing the German that were surrounding New York Company. They
had no idea they were selling New York Company as well.
(25:04):
So apparently they released a lot of pigeons, and a
lot of pigeons got shot, which means that there were
some German sharp shooters there. They were really good, because
it is tough, like you said, to shoot down a
homing pigeon because they are fast, or they were just
shooting a lot of bullets into the air. Yes, you know.
So they released one UM one of their last ones,
share me and share me. Um flew and flew and
(25:27):
took off and got hit at least once had a
quarter size hole in his breast, and it shot his
leg off. Shot the leg that had the tube with
the message saying where the New York Company was attached
to that leg it got shot off, but it also
got lodged into the hole and Sharemy's chest and the
(25:49):
bird flew back to its roost like that. Ye gave
the coordinates. Uh. I like to think that he chirped
them out even and said forget the message, but he
was saluting I believe in love. Uh. And a hundred
and ninety four men were saved, and Jeremy was awarded
the KOA Digio with palm. Yeah with palm, I don't
(26:15):
even know. Yeah, you don't want it without palm, No way,
that's half the award. Uh. Sadly died in nineteen nineteen
from the wounds. But man, what a great story. Yeah.
Now he's on display. I'm not sure exactly where, but
you can find pictures of him, uh, stuffed with just
one leg and the other leg with the tube still.
A test has been preserved as well. That's probably at
(26:37):
the Pigeon Ward Museum, probably in Providence with Rhode Island
and Chuck. I I have to say, um, I read
this one article too about it was called hawks and Doves,
and it was about the irony of using rock pigeons,
which are related to doves in some ways, or used
to be called doves, as like a wartime symbol. Oh really,
(26:58):
because they're very Peaceful's interesting. It's on her it's on
the page for this episode. Well, I think it's time
for another little respite, uh, and then we'll come back
and talk about the very sad story of the passenger pigeon.
Right for this all right, Josh, we've talked about rock pigeons,
(27:44):
which include homing pigeons, carrier pigeons, messenger pigeons, same thing
as a homing pigeon. But there's something called a passenger
pigeon which is not any of those things. And it
is not a thing anymore. No, it used to be
at I mean, it's a thing as far as past
tense goes. Yes, but there used to be a ton
(28:06):
of them. They're a native North American bird. They're about
one and a half times the size of a morning dove.
They looked a lot like them. And uh, like I said,
they were all over. Some say they made up of
the North American bird population. Yeah, that's that's a lot,
and they like to hang out together. They have the
(28:28):
largest documented flock um on record in Wisconsin. In eighteen
seventy one, they estimated a hundred and thirty six million
breeding passenger pigeons over eight hundred and fifty square miles
of forest. Yeah, that was Wisconsin. There's supposedly another flock
in eighteen sixty that reached three point seven billion flying
(28:50):
over Ontario. They supposedly blacked out the sky. Yeah. And
these are credible witnesses who are writing about these things
back in the early nineteenth century, like John James Audubon,
one who number one knew his birds a little bit,
knew what he was talking about, and it was a
credible scientist. And he wrote about a ride from I
think Lexington to um Louisville in Kentucky in eighteen thirteen,
(29:17):
and he talked about how long the way the sun
was blotted out and the sky from horizon to horizon
was filled with um passenger pigeons. It was either that
of the opium and this this wasn't like a thing
where it just happened, and you know, they flew overhead
and that was amazing. This went on for the whole
(29:37):
three day journey from Lexington to Louisville. The whole three days,
the sun was blotted out by one single flock of
passenger pigeons flying overhead, the same flock. Amazing, Like, you
just don't see that these days. Well, no, and you
definitely don't see that these days because, like we said,
they are completely extinct at this point. And you sit
(29:59):
along a rate article called one years after her death, Martha,
the last passenger pigeon, still resonates. And what happened was
a couple of things. One um, they were hunted relentlessly
for massive amounts of food. Oh yeah, when those flocks
can fly overhead, you know, you can just close your
(30:21):
eyes and start shooting up in the air and all
tons of passenger pigeons are gonna fall around you. Yes,
Like if you hunt something that big out of existence,
then you're doing a lot of hunting. So was that
combined with the deforestation of the East coast? Uh? If
they think both of those things led to the complete extinction. Yeah,
because they fed on mast which is one of my
(30:43):
favorite words of all time. Mass is like the description
of like, um, hardwood forest nuts like acorns and chestnuts
and hickory nuts and stuff like that. Combined those things
are called mass, right, And I think they fed together
as well, right, Yes, in groups. Right. So if you
start to bill roads, or you build like the world's
first subdivision in eighteen fifteen or something like that, and
(31:06):
you cut down a bunch of this forest, you fracture
this eight hundred and fifty square mile roost, this nest,
and you have a big problem if you're a passenger pigeons.
So that combined with overpredation by humans led to their extinctions.
So think about this, chuck. In the eighteen seventies, there
were billions of these things bills in nineteen fourteen the
(31:28):
last one died, So in like thirty forty years they
went from billions to extinct like that. Yes, And that
was Martha reference in the article. Um. She was born
into captivity, they believe at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo and then
donated later to the Cincinnati's Cincinnati Zoo. And um they
(31:50):
believe in nineteen hundred that there were these three populations
were all that was left. Yeah, the last one ever
seen in the wild was in eighteen ninety nine. So
they eventually died down and died down on Martha sadly
ended up like trembling in a cage because people would
throw sand at her to wake her up and like
have her move. So they indiventually had to you know,
wall that up, and she pricked her in for her
(32:14):
own safety. It's so sad. Uh. So they died out
completely and now she's on display at the Smithsonian until
October October this year. Uh, which is uh, which is
a what Chuck Well, a big lesson to mankind on
what can happen that's right, if you hunt too much
(32:34):
and if you build too many parking lots. Well, you know,
there's a there's a big discussion over the passenger pigeon
and bring it back. One of my personal heroes, Charles Man,
is caught in the center of this. Yes he is.
Did not know that, so you know, he wrote one
of my favorite book and in he talks about um.
(32:54):
There's there's a school of thought about the passenger pigeon
that um they were actually they their populations exploded just
prior to European settlement of North America. But after that
first Colombian contact, and the idea is that if you
(33:15):
go and look around a bunch of like Native American sites,
pre Columbian Native American sites, you don't find that many
passenger pigeon bones. There. Some there, but there's not a lot,
and there's certainly not enough to suggest that there were
billions of these things at the time. So this idea
is that after Colombian contact and disease and violence wiped
(33:35):
out and spread through North American and wiped out large
like of the Native Americans living there, the passenger pigeon
was no longer preyed upon by the Native Americans, and
so their population boomed. So in a way, all these
white settlers who hunted this thing into extinction are kind
of off the hook because it was their fault anyway
(33:57):
that led to this boom and population. Well, other scholarships
says like, no, you're ignoring a bunch of sites. It's
probably not the case. White European settlers of North America
probably did destroy to extinction a a perennially large population
of birds in North America. You know what they call that?
(34:18):
What a cautionary tale? Oh yeah, that sounds familiar. I've
heard that before. So there are some naturalists and scientists
and biologists now that they think they can bring back
the passenger pigeon. But should we? But should we? And
there's a bunch of schools of thought. There are some
conservation let's say, well, if we start bringing back extinct species,
(34:38):
maybe we won't protect the ones that are near extinction
because people, you know, as I guess robustly, because people say, well,
you can bring them back anyway, I don't know about that. Well,
I mean, what's what's the problem though? If you think
about it, like, what what does it matter to the
passenger pigeon? It doesn't know? Right? Well, yeah, I mean
there are none. Well that's the point. Yeah that a
(35:00):
lot of people say, leave it be. That's one thing.
But also, if you bring back a passenger pigeon, you
are bringing back something whose heritage has been interrupted and
therefore all of that that collective memory that's passed down
from one generation to the next has ended already. Right,
So who's going to teach that passenger pigeon how to
(35:23):
be a passenger pigeon? It may not know, It may
be a monster, a monster, It may kill entire families
of people. Well, thank god we have all those tiny
pigeon hammers, you know. Uh so, yeah, there's a lot
of schools of thought. Bring it back. It wouldn't know
what to do, or it might just pick up and
be fine. Who knows. All right, so we've talked about
we've covered passenger pigeons. Now the sad extinction of the
(35:46):
passenger pigeon. All those other pigeons talked about, Cameras on
the bellies, messages on backpacks and feet. Those are homing
messenger pigeons. I'm covering. I'm going back over everything here
we've covered. I don't think even think we mentioned drug traffickers.
Supposedly in Afghanistan and in in Pakistan, um carry ten grams
(36:06):
of heroin each heat and they've been used, so people
have been misusing and using and abusing these birds for millennia. Supposedly,
the average UM messenger pigeon can carry up to two
and a half ounces of something if it's balanced correctly
on its backpack. What two and a half ounces? So
(36:27):
these these things are being treated like royalty if all
they have to carry is ten grams of heroine, Yeah,
that's that's nothing. And when they show up. There's frequently
just nine grams, you know what I mean. So this
uh city pigeons just your average pigeon that everyone seems
(36:48):
to detest. Not everyone, Some people love these things and
feed them. Uh in France, in Paris, I believe it's
illegal to feed them, um because you know, you got
a Trafalgar Square in other places like at and they
can be so vast that you can't even walk. So
when you feed them, they congregate, and so that's a problem.
(37:09):
So they've outlawed it in a lot of place. Put everywhere,
they're dirty, they spread disease. It's all very true, yes,
and there have been some cases of legal cases in
lawsuits because of pigeons. There was one in France where
there was an American woman there feeding like twenty five
pounds of feed a day in Paris and it was
already I think outlawed in Paris. Yeah, she had been
(37:30):
fine nineteen times and nice, so I guess she like
was like, I'll go to Paris then so I can
feed the pigeons. She's like the creepy pigeon feeding lady
from Mary Poppins, remember her, Now feed the birds tup
into bag tupping tupping. Remember that was like five man.
A lot of that movie was creepy, not as creepy
(37:51):
as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which is like one of
the most disturbing children's movies. All this. The bad guy
is one of the skin guys her. Yeah, he was
pretty scary. Yeah. And by the way, Gon with the
wind was color not colorized. We goofed that one what
was colorized, and that never was color well, tid turn
her colorized some things, but that wasn't one of them, right,
(38:14):
But what was one of them? I don't know. We
could go back and look. It just looked funny, that's
all I remember. It's probably Citizen King. We'll hear about
an email. Huh, Yeah, it wasn't Citizen King. Um. So
this French I'm sorry, this American woman feeding all these
French pigeons. This other lady is on a park bench.
(38:34):
She's ticked off because there's all these pigeons everywhere. She
gets up, she tries to kick these things. She tears
her stockings and scratches her limbs up, her legs up apparently,
and takes this lady to court and they threw out
the case or they lost the case because the judge
basically said, you don't know how to kick a pigeon
without getting hurt. That's your fault, certainly not the American
(38:56):
lady's fault. The other lawsuit, oh, there was again in France.
The French like to sue people for pigeon related stuff. Um,
there's a woman who is living in an apartment in
a building a couple of floors above a store, furniture store,
and she would feed pigeons. Apparently the pigeon poop was
(39:16):
so bad that the store owner was saying it was
driving customers away, like all over the window window, or
like on the ground and on the door knob or whatever,
keeping people from coming to his store. So we sued
the woman, but the woman's lawyer apparently demonstrated that the
store owner couldn't prove that the mess came from the
(39:36):
pigeons that this lady was feeding. Could have been any pigeon. Yeah,
that's a dicey one. I guess we could finish here with,
um a couple of instruction aals what to do if
you find a homing pigeon. Yeah, I have to say
my favorite pigeon now is the homing pigeon. Yeah, I
think they're great. They don't they they They sure carry
(40:00):
a message if you want, and then I'll be a
messenger pigeon. But at heart, I'm just a homing pigeon.
I just want to go home. I want to hang
out and do my heroine, you know. So. Uh, here's
here's some advice, UM on what to do if you
find a stranded homing pigeon. UM. Number one, give it water.
That's the number one thing. Yeah. And don't force feet
(40:20):
at water like I did when I killed that bird. No, no,
because you don't want to drown it. Put it in
a dish, like a one inch deep dish. Yeah, and
don't overwater it like your yard. Right, you could just
bring the pigeon to my yard and let it drink
from my flooded lawn. So let it drink on its
own in a one inch deep container. UM, offer it
some food. Say you're hungry. Yeah, And you might say
(40:42):
I don't have pigeon food. Yes you do if you
have rice, um, pop popcorn? Uh, what else, buck wheat, barley,
canary seed, any of that stuff. Say you're hungry, you're thirsty,
how you doing? And then again, just put the stuff
out for the pigeon to enjoy and choose on his
or her own whether he or she wants to do this.
(41:03):
Next thing you do is say how's the temperature in
for you? Are you're feeling good? You want to scar?
It's uh, it's really cold. It's maybe let's warm it
up a little. It's really warm, let me cool it down. Yeah.
I think they tend to prefer temper slightly yeah, on
the cooler side of temperate. Um. And then they also
like to be able to see. But you want to
keep them in a place that's safe away from like
(41:25):
dogs and cats, but also in in in like a
box or something, So a box of the screen over it,
a dog kennel with the kennel door closed, um, something
like that, and with maybe some straw, a blanket something
that it can just hang around in. And again some
seed and some water and what. You just do this
for like two days, right, Yeah. After a day or two,
(41:46):
you say how you feeling, Are you rested? Are you comfortable?
Just getting the food in? Beaby, Um, it's time for
you to go home. And then you just get your
timing little hammer out. Don't make me use this, you do.
You just release the homing pigeon and that little dude
or lady um should find his or her way home.
Like you can bet on it and say, hey, thanks
(42:08):
for the stay. That was great. Well that's what the
pigeon would say to you. If that pigeon says that
to you, you go catch it again and make some
money off of it, because most pigeons can't do that,
like Michigan j bullfrog. So uh with um again. Homing
pigeons are my favorite. And if if you find one
and it decides not to leave you, um, you have
(42:32):
yourself a homing pigeon as a pet. That's right. You
can also buy them if you're into homing pigeons and
raise them yourself. And when you do, you can train
them to do all sorts of neat stuff, but mostly
you can train them to race and fly very long distances.
And there's a really neat um tried and true technique
for training homing pigeons and it's basically all just food based. Yeah.
(42:54):
So they have their nests, like training any animal, they
have their home base and this is where they stay,
they spend most of the time. This is where they eat,
and you can take them elsewhere. Hundreds of miles away
if you like. But they say you should start off
with just like twenty miles time out something like that,
and create like another roost somewhere at a friend's house
or um out in a field that you have permission
(43:18):
to use. You know, make sure you have permission to
use the field, and you create a roost and you
um set up food there too. Let the pigeon hang out,
spend some time there. If you want the pigeon to
go back home, probably all you have to do is
release it from the second roost, and it'll want to
go back home. But a sure fire way of doing
that is to remove its food right in that second
(43:39):
second roost sounds mean, and then well it'll be like,
well I want some food, I'm gonna fly home. And
it flies home and it gets to eat its food,
and you um. Any pigeon roosts, any homing pigeon roost
has a trap door that the pigeon can get into,
but it can't get back out unless you let it out.
But they can so they can come home and get
in whenever they want, so they always have food. But
(44:00):
if you want him to go to the second roost,
point B, you just take their food away at home,
and they'll say, I know another place to go get food,
and I'm gonna fly to it now. Once you get
that down a few times, you can keep moving that
roost further and further out. They're gonna find it. And
if you say tell a friend that if they hang
out at the second roots will get a special message.
You can attach like a little backpack to your home
(44:22):
and pigeons and release it and it'll delight your friend
with whatever message you said. This is something I could
actually see you doing in like retirement. Well, a lot
of people do. Did you see that list of famous
people who love pigeons raised pigeons? No, I didn't, but
I know Mike Tyson is one of them. Apparently he's
following a big tradition of boxers who raised pigeons. George Foreman, Marvelous,
(44:43):
Marvin Hagler, boxers who raise pigeons to all these people
on this list, Yeah, Chaccy from Choccy and Charge, he uh,
he raised pigeons, Charles and Charge, Terry Bradshaw, Elvis Presley,
Who's who's that? I'm just kidding, h Charles Darwin Barney
apparently from from It says here he's the big purple
(45:04):
dinosaur in Sesame Street. That seems a little confused, But
I guess Barney raised pigeons, Lee Marvin, you know what
we should do is pick out the least likely person
to be a pigeon. I think you just said it.
Who Lee Marvin? Yeah, you might be right. Actually, you
know the um the I would like to see The
Birdman of Alcatraz again. That was a great movie. Jimmy
(45:27):
smits what he's been doing. But yeah, I guess so
some of these makes sense, Like Paul Newman and Joined Woodward.
That seems like a totally thing that they would have
done together. There was a riveting moment at the end
of the Pigeons episode where Chuck and Josh just that
they're read quietly on Mike Tony Curtis. I think Lee
Marvin's least likely. You think, yeah, all right, you got
(45:48):
anything else? No, I don't think I do. Well, now
that you can tell the difference between a homing pigeon,
a messenger pigeon, a carrier pigeon, and a passenger pigeon,
you should up pretty good about yourself. Uh. And if
you need to brush up on this confusing stuff, you
can type the word pigeon into the search bart how
stuff works dot Com and it will bring up who
(46:09):
knows what? That's right? Uh? And since I said who
knows what, it's time for a listener. Now, all right,
this is uh, I'm gonna call this Kepler planet follow up. Um.
Hey guys, in one aspect of Kepler planets, you did
not mention we can only infer other planets if their
orbital plane is aligned with our view of it. Uh.
(46:29):
If the stars planet system is off tilt with respect
to us, we won't be able to infer its existence. Yet.
Consider the North Star Hilaris. It's kind of perpendicular to
the it's kind of perpendicular to the Solar System. Well,
not really, but close enough. If Polaris Polaris had a
planet with intelligent life with Kepler like technology, they could
(46:50):
view our Sun, but they wouldn't detect any light variations
or wobble. Consider how many planets we found, now, consider
how many we can't possibly find keiving current technology. It's
because of the tilt. I mean they say that supposedly.
Remember forty billion Earth like planets in the Milky Way alone.
That's what we suspect so even more than that, maybe,
(47:11):
says Jim from the Garden State. I don't know why
I said it, like Massachusetts, the Garden State. Uh, New Jersey.
I think that's how they're talking New Jersey. I lived there,
power so that was your jersey. No, that wasn't my jersey.
Let's hear it. Come on, come on, see now I'm
(47:32):
doing it. Thanks Jim in New Jersey. Uh, if you
want to point out something we should have mentioned but didn't,
we always love being corrected. It's one of our things. Uh.
We also love hooking ourselves up to car batteries. You
can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
(47:52):
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
stuff Podcast the house, Stuff Works dot com, and there's
always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.
That was not Jerry, And this is stuff you should know.
(00:25):
I love that we have a new trend here of
starting our animal centric podcasts with impressions of that animal,
because you did your what I thought was a dolphin,
but it was a bad and I just did a pigeon,
which that was a pretty good pigeon. Well, come on,
cool goes again. He just blew me away with your
pige in New York pigeon. Cool. I'm cooling here, Yeah,
(00:49):
I'm going here. How's it going. I feel ashamed all
of the stuff. Uh, we've gotten a lot of requests
for um messenger pigeons we have over the years, and
you said I'm going to heed the call and put
together a nice little conglomerate of articles on it. And
I thought it was super interesting and a bit confusing
(01:12):
in terminology because as we will soon divulge, and I
guess we're about to messenger pigeons homing pigeons. Well no,
not really. Oh yeah, the same like a lot of
it is just right. I'm sorry for those. Are you
chose the two that are the same all the others
are different? Yeah, Homing pigeons and passenger peasants pigeons different,
(01:37):
different um. Carrier pigeons different than messenger pigeons, which is
very confusing. It's all just confusing. Well, it's clear through
the crud and the mare and the mock and get
to the differences between types of pigeons, because most people do.
(01:57):
When you think of a carrier pigeon, chuck, you're probably
lumping together a bunch of different pigeons into the same category.
And you would be right in a certain way, and
that most of the pigeons that we consider carrier pigeons
um are descended from rock pigeons. Yeah, we don't want
to be pigeon lumpers. No, all pigeons are different and
(02:17):
beautiful in their own way, that's right. Rock pigeons originally
named so from the rock dove I believe, which they
inhabited mountains and sea cliffs, and I think that's why
they were called rock sure, or they love poison. That'd
be glam rock pigeons hair rock hair. Rock pigeons glam rock. No,
(02:40):
not quite as glam rocks rock Glary Gary Glitter, Yeah,
and I think a little older like glam rock to
me was seventies. Hair rock was the eighties kind of
bastardization of glam rock. Not nearly as good as like
the New York Dolls. Let's say, sure, right, you know
who were way better than Gary Glitter as it turns
out in the end, that's right. Oh yeah, she's forgot
(03:02):
about that all right. Back to pigeons, we haven't even
started yet. They were all descended from rock pigeons, kind
of like do you remember a Thoroughbred horse Artum episode?
How can I forget? I love that one. Yeah, I
didn't like it that much because I was it was
dense for me. There's a lot of information there. The
(03:24):
difference between thoroughbred horses and pigeons is that there's not
that much information on pigeon legion lineages, despite the fact
that some people show them right. And this is where
we finally arrive at carrier pigeons. That's right, they are,
as this article points out, fancy pigeons and their bred
to to to show their ornamental, very weird ways. Yeah,
(03:47):
they have what's on their nose. If you look up
a true carrier pigeon, you're gonna see a lot of
pictures of just homing pigeons. But look until you find
one that looks like it has a rotten walnut on
its Now it looks like it's pecked into a tara
toma and it's come out and just stuck around the
bird's beak. Yeah, that's called a wattle, sir, wattle to
(04:12):
two words, wattle dash sir, c E r E and um.
It is a fleshy thing on the bill, and they
do say it resembles the texture of a walnut, and
that's what it starts out as they get big and
even more gross looking. Yeah, and it's at the top
of the bill, which is when you see one, uh
carrier pigeon with just one of these wattles on top
(04:34):
of its beak, You're like, that's a little weird looking.
But I've seen birds with that little growth right there before.
As they mature, these wattles start popping up all around
their beak and it's it's just growny, like they have
them beneath around the sides. It's gross. It's like a
bird only a passenger passenger lover, Fancier would love like
(04:56):
they love these things. But most people when they seem like,
oh man, look at that right. Yeah, And if you're
showing carrier pigeons like the pigeons like great, amazing waddle,
is is something to be shown off and displayed. It's
like a point of pride among the show where or
not me, Bud Fancier, I say, cover that thing up. People,
by the way, who like just kidding, who like pigeons
(05:19):
and are into showing and raising and using pigeons for
fun um are called pigeon fanciers. By the way, Yeah,
I just said that, Oh you did. Yeah, but I
didn't explain it. I just slipped it in. Okay, well,
wanting to explain it. Yeah, people are probably like, why
did Chuck just say Fancier? Who does he think he is?
What does he think he's the king in England? No,
(05:39):
but the carrier pigeon is the king of pigeons. According
to fanciers, that was not bad. Uh. Pigeons were imported
to the US from Europe in eighteen sixty, and by
eighteen seventy two the first racing clubs were formed. Apparently
Philadelphia has or probably still do or had the largest
concentration of fanciers in the late eighteen hundreds, and um,
(06:02):
racing pigeons is a really big deal. Still yeah. The
reason you can race pigeons is that rock pigeon descendants,
whether they be carrier although I don't think I think
carrier is the least strong of all of them, but
especially homing and messenger pigeons, they're really fast and they
are capable of flying their way their way over very
(06:24):
long distances, that's right, And they find their way home
because they return in general to their nest to mate.
So this is why they return home. And we'll get
to how in a bit uh later, but like how
to train them to do that? Well, how to train
them in just how you know, science has figured out
that they do this, because it's pretty remarkable. Um. So
(06:47):
they fly around forty miles per hour on average, but
can reach his high sixty and apparently a hundred to
three hundred miles is just a walk in the park
for these guys and gals. Um, they have a record.
I don't know if it's a documented record, but they've
verified that a homing pigeon named Charlie flew and fifty
(07:09):
miles from the UK to Brazil and he wasn't even
supposed to isn't that crazy? Yeah, apparently he was in
a race and um, I guess his nest was in
Brazil originally, and he figured it out and made his
way there to Brazil even though he was in a
local race at the time in England. And the nuts.
It's pretty nuts. So apparently the racing pigeons and we
(07:30):
could do I mean, there's so much on racing pigeons
that we're not even gonna get to acide for mentioning it.
But the racing homer is the specific type of pigeon
that is bred to race because the homer is the fastest,
which is ironic if you're a Simpsons fan. Oh yeah,
because Homer is not a fast guy. Yeah, you know, no,
he's really not. So. Homing pigeons are are bread specifically
(07:55):
to find their way home. I mean, they're good at
it anyway, like you said, but they select of we
breathe these things if you're going to be a fancier
to do so. And when you're when you're raising a
homing pigeon or something like that, basically what you're doing
is you're taking it to a place away from its home. Yeh,
smack it on the head right with a little tiny
hammer so they wake up. Yeah, and uh no, don't
(08:18):
do that, no pigeon, if you're ever just kidding, don't
do that. Uh. And then you release it and it
will find its way back home, and you release it
at the same time as some other ones, and whicheveryone
finds its way home first is the winner. That's racing pigeons.
But as you said, homing pigeons are really good at
finding their way home naturally, but over time they've been
selectively bread by humans to be the best of the
(08:40):
best at this, Like compared to their wild ancestors, they
make them look like utter poop. Yeah, just like your
basic rock pigeon. Yeah. Uh So let's talk a little
bit about the different theories on how they find their
way home. Um, there's some new findings and what they
generally think now is it could be a combination of
(09:02):
these things or like it seems like an everybody wins hypothesis. Yeah, basically, so, Um,
the sun could be one way that they find their
direction and just a general north south east west sort
of way when it's cloudy the Earth's magnetic field. Uh,
there's basically two different things going at work here. There's
a compass and then there's the map. And the compass
(09:23):
is just your sort of like just us. It's a
general header and the map is actually like where am
I now and where do I need to be? Yeah, well,
I'm back in New York. I'm one street and I
need to get down to the lower east side. But
the compass part is like, so that I'm right now
facing north, which means I need to turn around a
little bit and go until I'm facing east. That's right,
(09:46):
and using my map, I've figured this out. Yeah, this
one study I didn't follow up on it, the one
from Oxford that said they actually follow established roads at
some point. Do you know, did you look into that anymore? No,
I didn't see that. I wonder if that was just
like a speculation and that's been overturned, or if they
really do follow. So the fact that that we didn't
(10:07):
run into that anywhere else makes me think like it's
probably been abandoned. It seemed from what I can understand
that the two main competing, long standing, competing explanations, where
like you said, they're following magnetic lines um in the
Earth's magnetosphere, or they're following smells, tiny odor molecules that
(10:28):
they used to basically as a trail of brig crumbs
to lead them back towards their roost, their nest um.
And for a long time this was it was debated
whether this was the case or not. Um the fact
that they have such good compasses really lends a lot
of credibility to the idea that they can follow magnetic
lines and use those too to um orient themselves. And
(10:52):
there's actually this anecdote from the early eighties that really
lends a lot of support to the magnetic um theory,
and that is there was this one pigeon that was
caught around a lake in Yellowstone. And by caught, I
mean like it was seen for I think a few weeks,
like just flying in circles around this lake, which is
(11:14):
not what a home and pigeon is supposed to do. No,
they fly straight and purposeful toward home sure wherever they are. UM.
So this this naturalist apparently where'd you find this article?
I'm not sure which one this was in? Uh, Audubon
Society was one, and uh, well, well, I mean we've
got them all posted on our website. Right, Okay, So, um,
(11:35):
this naturalist who wrote this article that we're talking about,
UM got ahold of this pigeon and he took it
and cared for it and took it away from the
lake and released it. And the thing flew due east
and it was a North Carolina pigeon and it was
out in Yellowstone. So he said, you know what, this
lake area has a really weird magnetic magnetic field. It's
(11:56):
known for making compasses go hey wire. So this lends
a any decent amount of support to the magnetic line theory. Yeah, agreed,
but it's been overturned recently or at least diminished as
far as um the smell theory, right, Well, I don't
know about overturned. I think again it's like everyone wins.
I think from what I ended up with was that
(12:17):
they use all of these things when it's most beneficial,
like they'll use one. If it's like if the magnetic
field is not as strong, then they'll go to one
of the other tried and true methods like smell. Yes,
smell was another one, and then recently UM sound, specifically infrasound,
which are sound waves super low frequency that we can't
(12:40):
hear them. There's a geophysicist named John Hagstrom that cooked
up this idea, uh and published it in the Journal
of Experimental Biology, and he said, basically, he thinks that
they hear their way home, which you know, makes a
lot of sense. Yeah, And apparently this um that pigeon
back in the early piece that was around yellow Stone,
(13:02):
that lake and Yellowstone that was having a hard time. Um.
That phenomenon is called a release site bias. In some
places in the world, if you release a homing pigeon,
they're gonna have a hard time finding their way home
or else they're gonna end up getting stuck flying around
in circles. And it's generally unexplained. So it's led to
this whole sub field of study of homing pigeon maps
(13:24):
and how they do this stuff. And um, this subsonic
sound theory basically says that they follow basically sound maps. Yeah,
sort of like echo location is what it sounded like
to me with bats. Yeah, but they're just hearing. They're
not like creating a sound and listening for the echo.
They're just listening out for the sound. But they're almost
(13:45):
listening out for sound in much the same way that
they would follow, say, odorant molecules like a trail of
brick crumbs. They're listening for familiar subsonic sounds as low
as point zero five hurts. Uh, And like you said,
we create a sound map and um. He basically compared
it to the same thing that we see when we
(14:07):
look out with our eyeballs at something. Yeah, but they
can hear it, right, So they would like see their
home the way we see our home when we're driving
like up to it. Yeah, they hear their home and
they know which way to go toward it. Yeah. Yeah,
if you could see what I hear? Have you ever
seen that movie? No? Is that a lifetime movie? It
(14:27):
could have been if there was Lifetime back then, but
it was the eighties movie. Was the guy that played
the beast Master. He played a very famous blind man
who was a piano player, and it was called If
You Could See What I Hear? So I think blind
people use sound in similar ways. Was it blind Tom
the uh, the Savant? I can't remember. He's sort of
(14:50):
like a piano player, playboy type. I just remember seeing
on cable when I was a kid, and I think
Mark singer was the guy. Yeah, but I can't remember
the real guy, but he was a real die. Did
you see or hear about the Lifetime movie that um
Kristen Wig and Will Ferrell made And no one can
figure out if it was like a piece of comedy
genius or else if they were like serious or what. Well, no,
(15:12):
they figured it out. I mean they basically went to
make the movie and just said, let's just do this
as straight up as we can. But because it's us,
that'll just have that edge that you know, like Will
Ferrell being serious is one of the funniest things in
the world. So it was comedic genius. Well yeah, because
it's them. But they weren't like, let's try and make
(15:32):
this funny. They just said, let's do this as straight
as possible. I didn't know if like both of them
happened to have like a family member who needed surgery
at the same time, so they like signed on to
this project. It's pretty weird. Have you seen it? Yeah? Yeah,
I saw it, and it's it is tough because they
are hysterical but it's so straight. It's like, I don't
know how to register this. This is like like the
(15:53):
Room or something like that Wow. Wow, that was just
a bad movie that ended up being hysterical. But this
isn't much the same. I gotta see this what the
room or no, the other one? You gotta see him
both what I've seen the room? Okay, what's the what's
the lifetime movie one called? I can't remember. I guess
if you just search Will Ferrell lifetime movie, it'll come up.
(16:15):
But there's a lot of weird things. He did that
Spanish language movie, and he did that the mini series. Uh,
he takes chances. Good for him, he's in a position
to do so. H So I feel like this is
a pretty good time to take a break, don't you. Yes,
and re gather ourselves. Yes, let's do that starting now,
(16:59):
all right. So we everard basically how they find their
way home and the competing theories, and I think they
all just lived together in one big, happy family because
they haven't disproved the theories. The pigeons, Yeah, the pigeons
do too. They like each other, but I don't. I
don't think anyone has disproven anything. So at this point,
I think they're taking all comers as far as those
(17:19):
theories go. Yeah. So, and this is um not specific too.
Is it specific to homing pigeons, although it would include
messenger pigeons, wouldn't it because and carrier pigeons does it,
but not passenger pigeons. Okay, so they're all dead. The
only difference between a messenger pigeon and a homing pigeon
(17:41):
is that, Um, a messenger pigeon has something either a
two bonnuts leg or a little backpack that contains a message.
I think the backpack is the new method, and they
used to do the tube on the leg. I think
the backpack is way cuter. Yeah, it's adorable. Backpack, you can.
What I can't figure out is a difference between a
messenger pigeon and a carrier pigeon. Okay, so here's a
(18:04):
carrier pigeon is not bread for flying, it's not bread
for its homing abilities. It's not bred to race, it's
not bread to send. It's basically, um, the Pekinese of pigeons. Okay, No,
I got I got it. I'm just picturing them in
my head, got you. So carrier is confusing me because
they're not They're not actually carrying anything. No, that is
(18:24):
why it's so confusing. Of all of them, they should
not have the word carrier attached. It should be like
virtually useless pigeon with the horrible wattle on its beach.
That's the new car pigeon. Hammer to talk them on
the head. Now, that's homing pigeons. So carrier pigeons are
are for show. Got you. They're the best and show
(18:45):
of pigeons. So the homing pigeon is the one who
carries a message. Generally it's written on little tiny pieces
of thin. That's the messenger pigeon, which is a homing
pigeon that is carrying a message exactly. Yeah, that's where
we are, okay, but I mean it can get confusing.
I'm sorry to act to you know what I mean
to be. No, I think I just said a messenger pigeon,
didn't I I don't remember. Okay, let's through wine and listen.
(19:08):
At any rate, the messenger pigeon is a homing pigeon
that carries a message, and they have been around for
a long time. Egypt, the Phoenicians romans. Uh Noah, yeah,
Noah in the in the Bible. He was the first dude.
I thought those were doves. But apparently I ran across
(19:32):
a comment on it that dove and pigeon were interchangeable
back then, back in old timey aramaic days. All right,
well that makes sense. Apparently in ancient Rome when they
had chariot races that not just like a chariot race
in a stadium, but like a long chariot race over distance,
they would send um the passenger. I'm sorry, man, here
(19:55):
we go the messenger pigeons back with the news of
who won. He right, so that I attached, you know,
brutus one, this one, go tell them everybody, and I
guess an hour later they would get there and everyone
would be too drunk to realize that they cared at
that point. Genghis Khan used them. He had like a
whole system set up. Oh yeah, we've never really talked
(20:18):
about him, have we? Yeah? We have. Did we do
an episode on that? Yeah? We did, Yeah, about whether
or they killed like a million people or something. And
I can't find that episode anywhere. I'm pretty sure recovered it.
I felt like we did too. Jerry's nodding us or
either she's falling asleep in the way over and over again.
(20:38):
Uh so, yeah, Genghis Khan had a whole system across
Asia and Europe like a relay system. Pretty impressive. Germans
used them actually attached little cameras through their bellies. That
was World War One. Yeah. So the modern use of
messenger pigeons uh in warfare was actually it seems to
be started by the French and went all the way
(21:00):
up through the Vietnam War. Yeah. So there's a like
the French love using messenger pigeons in a war like setting, right, um.
And there was the Siege of Paris. The Prussians were
attacking Paris, and Paris was finally saved. There reinforcements thanks
to a group of carrier pigeons or messenger pigeons um
(21:20):
who got word that Paris was being was under siege
and uh they needed help, and help arrived and Paris
was saved. As I said, a few times Prussians were defeated,
and the pigeon was so beloved as a result that
the same guy who um created the Statue of Liberty
also created a tribute to pigeons that was that stood
(21:44):
in Paris up until warld boar World War two, when
they melted it down because they needed the medal. I
think so. So by the time World War one rolled around,
pigeons were very much established as a very useful means
of communication when all else failed. Um in war. Yeah,
apparently they're so fast that they're hard to shoot down. Uh,
(22:07):
and they get where they want to go. In the
case in France and uh, how do you pronounce it?
M A R and the Battle of the Marne, there
were seventy two pigeon lofts and as they advanced forward,
they took the loss with them. A lot of the
pigeons that were out carrying messages, Uh, we're out when
they moved the loft were out when they moved the loss.
(22:28):
And we're still able to find their lofts blind, not
knowing where these lofts ended up. Amazing, go pigeons. Uh,
there was there were laws passed during wartime. This one
Regulation twenty one A shooting homing pigeons, Killing, wounding or
molesting gross homing pigeons is punishable on the defense of
(22:49):
the realm regulations by six months imprisonment or one pounds fine.
That's that's just a fine. In France, you could be
executed for impeding, uh messenger pigeons a wartime pigeon, and
there were also rewards offered five pound rewards, Uh for
any You know, if you turn in your your friend
(23:11):
for shooting a homing pigeon, get five pounds five pounds exactly. Yeah,
so it's a big, big deal. They were dogs, apparently
two and pigeons were used heavily in wartime to carry
messages like very reliably. Um, should we tell the story
of Sheremi? How can we not? I don't see how
we could. In World War One, you mentioned that the
(23:37):
Germans were using um, uh, passenger or messenger pigeons with
camera strap to their belly for aerial reconnaissance. Right, it's
like the bats with the bombs kind of, but this
is more photography rather than incendiary destruction. Um. But the
French we're using this for um messages, for getting them
(23:58):
from the front, you know, to behind the lines HQ.
And so were the Americans too. Apparently the French used
like thirty thousand of them in World War One. Americans
had something like six hundred. But one really came through
for New York Company at the Battle of the Argonne
was October nineteen eighteen, towards the end of the war,
(24:20):
and they were trapped by as the Germans. So this
this pigeon named Jereh me Uh was released by I
think it was New York Company, right, which was surrounded
in a little low lying I don't even think you
can call it a valley. I think the author of
this New York Times article that we're getting this from
called it like a depression in the ground. And there's
(24:42):
a few hundred men who were there. It started out
as five hundred UM and they were starting to get
whittled down because they were surrounded by Germans. Even worse
than that, the American UM reinforcements had no idea where
this this New York Company was, and they were they
were showing them too, because they thought that they were
showing the German that were surrounding New York Company. They
had no idea they were selling New York Company as well.
(25:04):
So apparently they released a lot of pigeons, and a
lot of pigeons got shot, which means that there were
some German sharp shooters there. They were really good, because
it is tough, like you said, to shoot down a
homing pigeon because they are fast, or they were just
shooting a lot of bullets into the air. Yes, you know.
So they released one UM one of their last ones,
share me and share me. Um flew and flew and
(25:27):
took off and got hit at least once had a
quarter size hole in his breast, and it shot his
leg off. Shot the leg that had the tube with
the message saying where the New York Company was attached
to that leg it got shot off, but it also
got lodged into the hole and Sharemy's chest and the
(25:49):
bird flew back to its roost like that. Ye gave
the coordinates. Uh. I like to think that he chirped
them out even and said forget the message, but he
was saluting I believe in love. Uh. And a hundred
and ninety four men were saved, and Jeremy was awarded
the KOA Digio with palm. Yeah with palm, I don't
(26:15):
even know. Yeah, you don't want it without palm, No way,
that's half the award. Uh. Sadly died in nineteen nineteen
from the wounds. But man, what a great story. Yeah.
Now he's on display. I'm not sure exactly where, but
you can find pictures of him, uh, stuffed with just
one leg and the other leg with the tube still.
A test has been preserved as well. That's probably at
(26:37):
the Pigeon Ward Museum, probably in Providence with Rhode Island
and Chuck. I I have to say, um, I read
this one article too about it was called hawks and Doves,
and it was about the irony of using rock pigeons,
which are related to doves in some ways, or used
to be called doves, as like a wartime symbol. Oh really,
(26:58):
because they're very Peaceful's interesting. It's on her it's on
the page for this episode. Well, I think it's time
for another little respite, uh, and then we'll come back
and talk about the very sad story of the passenger pigeon.
Right for this all right, Josh, we've talked about rock pigeons,
(27:44):
which include homing pigeons, carrier pigeons, messenger pigeons, same thing
as a homing pigeon. But there's something called a passenger
pigeon which is not any of those things. And it
is not a thing anymore. No, it used to be
at I mean, it's a thing as far as past
tense goes. Yes, but there used to be a ton
(28:06):
of them. They're a native North American bird. They're about
one and a half times the size of a morning dove.
They looked a lot like them. And uh, like I said,
they were all over. Some say they made up of
the North American bird population. Yeah, that's that's a lot,
and they like to hang out together. They have the
(28:28):
largest documented flock um on record in Wisconsin. In eighteen
seventy one, they estimated a hundred and thirty six million
breeding passenger pigeons over eight hundred and fifty square miles
of forest. Yeah, that was Wisconsin. There's supposedly another flock
in eighteen sixty that reached three point seven billion flying
(28:50):
over Ontario. They supposedly blacked out the sky. Yeah. And
these are credible witnesses who are writing about these things
back in the early nineteenth century, like John James Audubon,
one who number one knew his birds a little bit,
knew what he was talking about, and it was a
credible scientist. And he wrote about a ride from I
think Lexington to um Louisville in Kentucky in eighteen thirteen,
(29:17):
and he talked about how long the way the sun
was blotted out and the sky from horizon to horizon
was filled with um passenger pigeons. It was either that
of the opium and this this wasn't like a thing
where it just happened, and you know, they flew overhead
and that was amazing. This went on for the whole
(29:37):
three day journey from Lexington to Louisville. The whole three days,
the sun was blotted out by one single flock of
passenger pigeons flying overhead, the same flock. Amazing, Like, you
just don't see that these days. Well, no, and you
definitely don't see that these days because, like we said,
they are completely extinct at this point. And you sit
(29:59):
along a rate article called one years after her death, Martha,
the last passenger pigeon, still resonates. And what happened was
a couple of things. One um, they were hunted relentlessly
for massive amounts of food. Oh yeah, when those flocks
can fly overhead, you know, you can just close your
(30:21):
eyes and start shooting up in the air and all
tons of passenger pigeons are gonna fall around you. Yes,
Like if you hunt something that big out of existence,
then you're doing a lot of hunting. So was that
combined with the deforestation of the East coast? Uh? If
they think both of those things led to the complete extinction. Yeah,
because they fed on mast which is one of my
(30:43):
favorite words of all time. Mass is like the description
of like, um, hardwood forest nuts like acorns and chestnuts
and hickory nuts and stuff like that. Combined those things
are called mass, right, And I think they fed together
as well, right, Yes, in groups. Right. So if you
start to bill roads, or you build like the world's
first subdivision in eighteen fifteen or something like that, and
(31:06):
you cut down a bunch of this forest, you fracture
this eight hundred and fifty square mile roost, this nest,
and you have a big problem if you're a passenger pigeons.
So that combined with overpredation by humans led to their extinctions.
So think about this, chuck. In the eighteen seventies, there
were billions of these things bills in nineteen fourteen the
(31:28):
last one died, So in like thirty forty years they
went from billions to extinct like that. Yes, And that
was Martha reference in the article. Um. She was born
into captivity, they believe at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo and then
donated later to the Cincinnati's Cincinnati Zoo. And um they
(31:50):
believe in nineteen hundred that there were these three populations
were all that was left. Yeah, the last one ever
seen in the wild was in eighteen ninety nine. So
they eventually died down and died down on Martha sadly
ended up like trembling in a cage because people would
throw sand at her to wake her up and like
have her move. So they indiventually had to you know,
wall that up, and she pricked her in for her
(32:14):
own safety. It's so sad. Uh. So they died out
completely and now she's on display at the Smithsonian until
October October this year. Uh, which is uh, which is
a what Chuck Well, a big lesson to mankind on
what can happen that's right, if you hunt too much
(32:34):
and if you build too many parking lots. Well, you know,
there's a there's a big discussion over the passenger pigeon
and bring it back. One of my personal heroes, Charles Man,
is caught in the center of this. Yes he is.
Did not know that, so you know, he wrote one
of my favorite book and in he talks about um.
(32:54):
There's there's a school of thought about the passenger pigeon
that um they were actually they their populations exploded just
prior to European settlement of North America. But after that
first Colombian contact, and the idea is that if you
(33:15):
go and look around a bunch of like Native American sites,
pre Columbian Native American sites, you don't find that many
passenger pigeon bones. There. Some there, but there's not a lot,
and there's certainly not enough to suggest that there were
billions of these things at the time. So this idea
is that after Colombian contact and disease and violence wiped
(33:35):
out and spread through North American and wiped out large
like of the Native Americans living there, the passenger pigeon
was no longer preyed upon by the Native Americans, and
so their population boomed. So in a way, all these
white settlers who hunted this thing into extinction are kind
of off the hook because it was their fault anyway
(33:57):
that led to this boom and population. Well, other scholarships
says like, no, you're ignoring a bunch of sites. It's
probably not the case. White European settlers of North America
probably did destroy to extinction a a perennially large population
of birds in North America. You know what they call that?
(34:18):
What a cautionary tale? Oh yeah, that sounds familiar. I've
heard that before. So there are some naturalists and scientists
and biologists now that they think they can bring back
the passenger pigeon. But should we? But should we? And
there's a bunch of schools of thought. There are some
conservation let's say, well, if we start bringing back extinct species,
(34:38):
maybe we won't protect the ones that are near extinction
because people, you know, as I guess robustly, because people say, well,
you can bring them back anyway, I don't know about that. Well,
I mean, what's what's the problem though? If you think
about it, like, what what does it matter to the
passenger pigeon? It doesn't know? Right? Well, yeah, I mean
there are none. Well that's the point. Yeah that a
(35:00):
lot of people say, leave it be. That's one thing.
But also, if you bring back a passenger pigeon, you
are bringing back something whose heritage has been interrupted and
therefore all of that that collective memory that's passed down
from one generation to the next has ended already. Right,
So who's going to teach that passenger pigeon how to
(35:23):
be a passenger pigeon? It may not know, It may
be a monster, a monster, It may kill entire families
of people. Well, thank god we have all those tiny
pigeon hammers, you know. Uh so, yeah, there's a lot
of schools of thought. Bring it back. It wouldn't know
what to do, or it might just pick up and
be fine. Who knows. All right, so we've talked about
we've covered passenger pigeons. Now the sad extinction of the
(35:46):
passenger pigeon. All those other pigeons talked about, Cameras on
the bellies, messages on backpacks and feet. Those are homing
messenger pigeons. I'm covering. I'm going back over everything here
we've covered. I don't think even think we mentioned drug traffickers.
Supposedly in Afghanistan and in in Pakistan, um carry ten grams
(36:06):
of heroin each heat and they've been used, so people
have been misusing and using and abusing these birds for millennia. Supposedly,
the average UM messenger pigeon can carry up to two
and a half ounces of something if it's balanced correctly
on its backpack. What two and a half ounces? So
(36:27):
these these things are being treated like royalty if all
they have to carry is ten grams of heroine, Yeah,
that's that's nothing. And when they show up. There's frequently
just nine grams, you know what I mean. So this
uh city pigeons just your average pigeon that everyone seems
(36:48):
to detest. Not everyone, Some people love these things and
feed them. Uh in France, in Paris, I believe it's
illegal to feed them, um because you know, you got
a Trafalgar Square in other places like at and they
can be so vast that you can't even walk. So
when you feed them, they congregate, and so that's a problem.
(37:09):
So they've outlawed it in a lot of place. Put everywhere,
they're dirty, they spread disease. It's all very true, yes,
and there have been some cases of legal cases in
lawsuits because of pigeons. There was one in France where
there was an American woman there feeding like twenty five
pounds of feed a day in Paris and it was
already I think outlawed in Paris. Yeah, she had been
(37:30):
fine nineteen times and nice, so I guess she like
was like, I'll go to Paris then so I can
feed the pigeons. She's like the creepy pigeon feeding lady
from Mary Poppins, remember her, Now feed the birds tup
into bag tupping tupping. Remember that was like five man.
A lot of that movie was creepy, not as creepy
(37:51):
as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which is like one of
the most disturbing children's movies. All this. The bad guy
is one of the skin guys her. Yeah, he was
pretty scary. Yeah. And by the way, Gon with the
wind was color not colorized. We goofed that one what
was colorized, and that never was color well, tid turn
her colorized some things, but that wasn't one of them, right,
(38:14):
But what was one of them? I don't know. We
could go back and look. It just looked funny, that's
all I remember. It's probably Citizen King. We'll hear about
an email. Huh, Yeah, it wasn't Citizen King. Um. So
this French I'm sorry, this American woman feeding all these
French pigeons. This other lady is on a park bench.
(38:34):
She's ticked off because there's all these pigeons everywhere. She
gets up, she tries to kick these things. She tears
her stockings and scratches her limbs up, her legs up apparently,
and takes this lady to court and they threw out
the case or they lost the case because the judge
basically said, you don't know how to kick a pigeon
without getting hurt. That's your fault, certainly not the American
(38:56):
lady's fault. The other lawsuit, oh, there was again in France.
The French like to sue people for pigeon related stuff. Um,
there's a woman who is living in an apartment in
a building a couple of floors above a store, furniture store,
and she would feed pigeons. Apparently the pigeon poop was
(39:16):
so bad that the store owner was saying it was
driving customers away, like all over the window window, or
like on the ground and on the door knob or whatever,
keeping people from coming to his store. So we sued
the woman, but the woman's lawyer apparently demonstrated that the
store owner couldn't prove that the mess came from the
(39:36):
pigeons that this lady was feeding. Could have been any pigeon. Yeah,
that's a dicey one. I guess we could finish here with,
um a couple of instruction aals what to do if
you find a homing pigeon. Yeah, I have to say
my favorite pigeon now is the homing pigeon. Yeah, I
think they're great. They don't they they They sure carry
(40:00):
a message if you want, and then I'll be a
messenger pigeon. But at heart, I'm just a homing pigeon.
I just want to go home. I want to hang
out and do my heroine, you know. So. Uh, here's
here's some advice, UM on what to do if you
find a stranded homing pigeon. UM. Number one, give it water.
That's the number one thing. Yeah. And don't force feet
(40:20):
at water like I did when I killed that bird. No, no,
because you don't want to drown it. Put it in
a dish, like a one inch deep dish. Yeah, and
don't overwater it like your yard. Right, you could just
bring the pigeon to my yard and let it drink
from my flooded lawn. So let it drink on its
own in a one inch deep container. UM, offer it
some food. Say you're hungry. Yeah, And you might say
(40:42):
I don't have pigeon food. Yes you do if you
have rice, um, pop popcorn? Uh, what else, buck wheat, barley,
canary seed, any of that stuff. Say you're hungry, you're thirsty,
how you doing? And then again, just put the stuff
out for the pigeon to enjoy and choose on his
or her own whether he or she wants to do this.
(41:03):
Next thing you do is say how's the temperature in
for you? Are you're feeling good? You want to scar?
It's uh, it's really cold. It's maybe let's warm it
up a little. It's really warm, let me cool it down. Yeah.
I think they tend to prefer temper slightly yeah, on
the cooler side of temperate. Um. And then they also
like to be able to see. But you want to
keep them in a place that's safe away from like
(41:25):
dogs and cats, but also in in in like a
box or something, So a box of the screen over it,
a dog kennel with the kennel door closed, um, something
like that, and with maybe some straw, a blanket something
that it can just hang around in. And again some
seed and some water and what. You just do this
for like two days, right, Yeah. After a day or two,
(41:46):
you say how you feeling, Are you rested? Are you comfortable?
Just getting the food in? Beaby, Um, it's time for
you to go home. And then you just get your
timing little hammer out. Don't make me use this, you do.
You just release the homing pigeon and that little dude
or lady um should find his or her way home.
Like you can bet on it and say, hey, thanks
(42:08):
for the stay. That was great. Well that's what the
pigeon would say to you. If that pigeon says that
to you, you go catch it again and make some
money off of it, because most pigeons can't do that,
like Michigan j bullfrog. So uh with um again. Homing
pigeons are my favorite. And if if you find one
and it decides not to leave you, um, you have
(42:32):
yourself a homing pigeon as a pet. That's right. You
can also buy them if you're into homing pigeons and
raise them yourself. And when you do, you can train
them to do all sorts of neat stuff, but mostly
you can train them to race and fly very long distances.
And there's a really neat um tried and true technique
for training homing pigeons and it's basically all just food based. Yeah.
(42:54):
So they have their nests, like training any animal, they
have their home base and this is where they stay,
they spend most of the time. This is where they eat,
and you can take them elsewhere. Hundreds of miles away
if you like. But they say you should start off
with just like twenty miles time out something like that,
and create like another roost somewhere at a friend's house
or um out in a field that you have permission
(43:18):
to use. You know, make sure you have permission to
use the field, and you create a roost and you
um set up food there too. Let the pigeon hang out,
spend some time there. If you want the pigeon to
go back home, probably all you have to do is
release it from the second roost, and it'll want to
go back home. But a sure fire way of doing
that is to remove its food right in that second
(43:39):
second roost sounds mean, and then well it'll be like,
well I want some food, I'm gonna fly home. And
it flies home and it gets to eat its food,
and you um. Any pigeon roosts, any homing pigeon roost
has a trap door that the pigeon can get into,
but it can't get back out unless you let it out.
But they can so they can come home and get
in whenever they want, so they always have food. But
(44:00):
if you want him to go to the second roost,
point B, you just take their food away at home,
and they'll say, I know another place to go get food,
and I'm gonna fly to it now. Once you get
that down a few times, you can keep moving that
roost further and further out. They're gonna find it. And
if you say tell a friend that if they hang
out at the second roots will get a special message.
You can attach like a little backpack to your home
(44:22):
and pigeons and release it and it'll delight your friend
with whatever message you said. This is something I could
actually see you doing in like retirement. Well, a lot
of people do. Did you see that list of famous
people who love pigeons raised pigeons? No, I didn't, but
I know Mike Tyson is one of them. Apparently he's
following a big tradition of boxers who raised pigeons. George Foreman, Marvelous,
(44:43):
Marvin Hagler, boxers who raise pigeons to all these people
on this list, Yeah, Chaccy from Choccy and Charge, he uh,
he raised pigeons, Charles and Charge, Terry Bradshaw, Elvis Presley,
Who's who's that? I'm just kidding, h Charles Darwin Barney
apparently from from It says here he's the big purple
(45:04):
dinosaur in Sesame Street. That seems a little confused, But
I guess Barney raised pigeons, Lee Marvin, you know what
we should do is pick out the least likely person
to be a pigeon. I think you just said it.
Who Lee Marvin? Yeah, you might be right. Actually, you
know the um the I would like to see The
Birdman of Alcatraz again. That was a great movie. Jimmy
(45:27):
smits what he's been doing. But yeah, I guess so
some of these makes sense, Like Paul Newman and Joined Woodward.
That seems like a totally thing that they would have
done together. There was a riveting moment at the end
of the Pigeons episode where Chuck and Josh just that
they're read quietly on Mike Tony Curtis. I think Lee
Marvin's least likely. You think, yeah, all right, you got
(45:48):
anything else? No, I don't think I do. Well, now
that you can tell the difference between a homing pigeon,
a messenger pigeon, a carrier pigeon, and a passenger pigeon,
you should up pretty good about yourself. Uh. And if
you need to brush up on this confusing stuff, you
can type the word pigeon into the search bart how
stuff works dot Com and it will bring up who
(46:09):
knows what? That's right? Uh? And since I said who
knows what, it's time for a listener. Now, all right,
this is uh, I'm gonna call this Kepler planet follow up. Um.
Hey guys, in one aspect of Kepler planets, you did
not mention we can only infer other planets if their
orbital plane is aligned with our view of it. Uh.
(46:29):
If the stars planet system is off tilt with respect
to us, we won't be able to infer its existence. Yet.
Consider the North Star Hilaris. It's kind of perpendicular to
the it's kind of perpendicular to the Solar System. Well,
not really, but close enough. If Polaris Polaris had a
planet with intelligent life with Kepler like technology, they could
(46:50):
view our Sun, but they wouldn't detect any light variations
or wobble. Consider how many planets we found, now, consider
how many we can't possibly find keiving current technology. It's
because of the tilt. I mean they say that supposedly.
Remember forty billion Earth like planets in the Milky Way alone.
That's what we suspect so even more than that, maybe,
(47:11):
says Jim from the Garden State. I don't know why
I said it, like Massachusetts, the Garden State. Uh, New Jersey.
I think that's how they're talking New Jersey. I lived there,
power so that was your jersey. No, that wasn't my jersey.
Let's hear it. Come on, come on, see now I'm
(47:32):
doing it. Thanks Jim in New Jersey. Uh, if you
want to point out something we should have mentioned but didn't,
we always love being corrected. It's one of our things. Uh.
We also love hooking ourselves up to car batteries. You
can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
(47:52):
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff
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