Nature & Animals
Top 7 Remarkable Facts About Pigeons
Often dismissed as feathered urban nuisances, pigeons are among the most underestimated animals on the planet. They have been used as aerial photographers and wartime messengers, can recognise complex visual patterns, navigate across extraordinary distances and even see colours that humans cannot. Their relationship with our species stretches back tens of thousands of years. Look a little closer and the humble pigeon turns out to be a rather remarkable bird.
Long before drones transformed aerial photography, a German pharmacist called Julius Neubronner was sending pigeons into the sky with miniature cameras strapped to their chests. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Neubronner developed a lightweight camera with an automatic shutter, designed to take photographs at intervals during a bird’s flight. His pigeons produced remarkable aerial images of towns, buildings and landscapes, often with a wingtip accidentally appearing at the edge of the frame. He patented the invention in 1908 and even sold postcards made from the photographs. The military investigated the idea for reconnaissance, although unpredictable flight paths made it difficult to control what the birds actually photographed.
When researchers fitted homing pigeons with GPS trackers and released them around Rome, they discovered that the birds were not always taking the most direct route home. Instead, many followed major roads and railway lines, sometimes making substantial detours to stay alongside familiar transport corridors. The researchers analysed 216 flights and found that road-following was a recurring feature of the birds’ journeys. It suggests pigeons can learn and use prominent features of the human-built environment as navigational landmarks. In other words, a pigeon may be doing something rather like following a satnav route, except its map is stored in its brain and it can fly over the traffic.
In a famous experiment, researchers trained pigeons to distinguish paintings by Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet from works by Cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso. The birds were rewarded for correctly classifying the paintings and eventually learned to recognise the different visual styles. More impressively, they could apply what they had learned to paintings they had never seen before. They were not appreciating the artistic merits of Monet or Picasso, of course, but they were identifying complex visual patterns and generalising from them. It was a surprisingly sophisticated performance from an animal more commonly associated with eating discarded sandwiches outside railway stations.
Human vision covers only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Pigeons, however, can detect ultraviolet wavelengths that are invisible to us, thanks to specialised photoreceptors in their eyes. This means the visual world of a pigeon contains patterns, contrasts and signals that we simply cannot experience. Ultraviolet vision can help birds distinguish features of their environment, identify other birds and interpret visual cues that are hidden from human eyes. The next time you see a pigeon pecking around a pavement, remember that it is looking at a world that is, in some respects, considerably more colourful than yours.
A study published in the journal Science in 2011 found that pigeons could learn to order groups of objects according to their numerical quantity. The researchers trained the birds to recognise that one came before two, two before three, and so on. The pigeons were then tested with combinations they had not encountered during training. Their performance on these numerical ordering tasks was statistically comparable to that of rhesus monkeys tested in related experiments. This does not mean pigeons can do arithmetic or understand numbers as humans do. It does show that the ability to recognise and order quantities is not restricted to mammals, and that a bird brain can manage some surprisingly abstract tasks.
Homing pigeons can return to their lofts from unfamiliar locations hundreds of kilometres away, and their sense of smell appears to play an important role. Experiments have shown that disrupting a pigeon’s olfactory system can seriously impair its ability to orient itself when released somewhere unfamiliar. One leading explanation is that birds learn the characteristic patterns of atmospheric odours associated with different geographical locations, building a kind of navigational map from the air itself. They also use other information, including the Sun and familiar landmarks, so smell is not the whole story. Nevertheless, the idea that a pigeon can use the scent of the atmosphere to work out where it is remains one of the most fascinating discoveries in animal navigation.
The relationship between humans and pigeons goes back much further than cities, parks and people feeding them breadcrumbs. At Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, archaeologists found evidence that Neanderthals repeatedly hunted and ate rock doves at least 67,000 years ago. The remains suggest this was not an isolated meal but a recurring source of food over a long period. Catching these birds would have required the ability to exploit their behaviour and reach them in their rocky habitats. It is a remarkable reminder that pigeons have been part of the human story for tens of thousands of years, long before modern humans began building the settlements in which their descendants would eventually become familiar urban residents.
Would you rank this the same?
Make your call.
Your choice becomes part of the conversation around this RANKD.