Carrier+Pigeons

Early Communication



Carrier Pigeons

Pigeon  s 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. 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: media type="youtube" key="7gIJvSX-P3o" height="360" width="640"
 * 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.