The homing pigeon belongs to the same species as the feral pigeons found in cities: Colombia livia, the Rock Dove. These birds have been domesticated for thousands of years. Those raised in captivity today are homing pigeons, racing pigeons, show pigeons, pets, or they’re used for food. Feral pigeons are the descendants of birds that escaped from captivity.
Why Do Homing Pigeons Carry Messages for People?
Pigeons naturally return to the place where they were born: if you take a pigeon some distance away from its home and let it go, it will fly back to where it started. If you attach a message to its leg, the bird will carry the message along with it. Thus, homing pigeons don’t volunteer to carry messages for people, they are just doing what comes naturally—people figured out how to take advantage of the behavior.
The History of Homing Pigeons
It’s thought that the ancient Egyptians were the first to use pigeons to carry messages. Aristotle wrote about using pigeons to carry messages in Greece during his lifetime (384 – 322 BCE), and the Romans kept them as well. More recent uses of homing pigeons include:
- They were the basis of a communications system between Iraq, Syria, and Persia (present day Iran) until the mid-thirteenth century.
- Monasteries in the nineteenth century used homing pigeons to pass messages back and forth, and developed new breeding methods to bring out certain desirable traits in the birds.
- Wealthy European landowners built special towers called dovecotes to house homing pigeons. Dovecotes were also built in parks. Some still exist today.
- In European warfare of the nineteenth century, as well as both World Wars, homing pigeons were used by troops in the field to send massages to headquarters.
- Before the advanced telecommunications we use today, news services often used homing pigeons.
- The American military used homing pigeons up until the mid-1950s.
How Do Homing Pigeons Find Their Way Home?
Pigeons are easy to keep and breed in captivity, and this makes it easy to research their ability to return home from long distances away. Despite this, scientists are still not sure how they do it. It’s likely that a number of things are involved:
- Visual cues—pigeons recognize landmarks and unique features near their home, but this only helps when they are close to home.
- The sun—pigeons navigate by the sun and are able to compensate for the sun's varying position at different times of day. They also use the moon and stars to guide them. However, they can still find their way when skies are overcast though it’s not so easy for them.
- Earth’s magnetic field—like many birds, pigeons have a magnetic compass that uses the Earth’s magnetic field to tell them which direction home lies.
- Smell—studies have suggested that pigeons can smell home to a certain degree.
Racing Pigeons are Homing Pigeons
The idea of racing pigeons wouldn’t work if the birds weren’t homing pigeons first: in racing, pigeons are transported to a distant point and released. The time it takes for them to return to their home is clocked and the fastest pigeon wins. Racing pigeons, then, are homing pigeons that have been bred for both their flying speed and their ability to return home.
After thousands of years of carrying everyday messages, news, and strategic or lifesaving information in wartime, most homing pigeons today are kept by fanciers and racing enthusiasts.
Sources:
Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds. Perrins, Christopher ed. Buffalo: Firefly Books, 2003
"Navigation and Homing in Pigeons." Chalmers, Gordon A. International Federation: IF Skytalk 2007
Pigeons. Vriends, Matthew, Tommy Erskine, Diane Jacky, and Michele Earle-Bridges. Hauppauge: Barron's, 2005.
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