Amazing Animals:
HOMING PIGEONS
• The homing pigeon is an ordinary sort of domestic pigeon derived from the common rock pigeon and trained to return home from long distances away. There is no real difference between a homing pigeon and a carrier pigeon aside from the amount of training it has received. • Chinese officials began using homing pigeons to transmit messages as early as 500 B.C. In the 1200s, Kublai Khan set up a network of pigeons that linked the entire Chinese empire. The system survived for over 600 years. • Caliph Aziz of Cairo had a passion for cherrries. In 980 A.D. he sent huge shipments of homing pigeons to the cherry orchards in Egypt. Slaves tied small bags containing one cherry each to the feet of the pigeons and sent them home to the Nile. • Homing pigeons made a fortune for the French Post Office during a siege of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The Prussian army encircled Paris, cutting telegraph wires, destroying communication cables, and strangling the postal service. From the surrounding countryside, about 1,000 privately owned homing pigeons were donated and the "Pigeon Post" was born. To get the mail through, messages were set in type, photographed in microscopic size and printed on thin film. Each bird could carry up to 8,000 letters per day in this manner, and two birds were dispatched each day. At a cost of ten cents per word, postal revenues brought in about $112,000. By the time the seige was over, pigeons had carried nearly 100,000 messages from Paris to the outside world. • In 1814, Nathan Rothschild learned of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo by carrier pigeon a full day before the general public new. As a result, he made a killing on the stock market.
• During World War I, nearly 200 soldiers of New York's 77th Infantry Division became isolated from other American forces. They were surrounded by enemy troops, and found themselves under fire from their own artillery. They had three homing pigeons and no other method of communication. On October 4, 1918, a message was attached to the leg of one pigeon and it was released, only to be shot down. The second pigeon was also killed. They had only one pigeon left—a carrier pigeon called Cher Ami, which is French for "dear friend." The message tied to his leg read, "Our artillery is dropping a barrage on us. For heaven's sake, stop it!" The bird was released, only to be shot through the leg. Miraculously, he kept flying— and was shot through the breast. But the bird kept going and arrived at his loft with the message barely attached to his mangled leg. Within hours help arrived and the 77th Infantry Division was saved. Cher Ami was awarded the French "Croix de Guerre." He died in 1919 as a result of his wounds and his remains are on display at the Smithsonian. • In the 1980s Lockheed's plant in California employed 15 carrier pigeons to carry microfilm capsules to the test base 30 miles away. The pigeons could make the trip in 40 minutes, faster than a courier in a car could. Also, they had an effectiveness rate of 100%. They never delivered to the wrong address, or showed up with damaged goods. • Homing pigeons and migratory birds can be deflected from their routes by radio transmitters. Homing pigeons cannot find their way if a magnet is tied to their necks. • The longest flight by a homing pigeon was 5,400 miles by a bird released from West Africa which travelled to its home in England in 1845. The trip took two months, and the bird fell dead only one mile from its loft.
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Weekly SUDOKU
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King CROSSWORD
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