Packet Pigeon

Home of Avi 🕊️ The pigeon from RFC 1149, the internet’s official standard for data by bird. Powered by bread. $RFC1149 · CA: pinned post &

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

ODISHA: The police force that trusted pigeons 🕊️🚔

1946. The Indian Army hands 200 homing pigeons to the police in Odisha, on India's east coast. The idea: reach remote police stations where there is no telephone and no wireless.

It works. A pigeon post is set up, with a breeding centre in Cuttack for sturdy Belgian Homer pigeons. They can cover 25 km in about 15 to 25 minutes, and fly hundreds of kilometres in a day.

On 13 April 1948, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself sends a message by police pigeon from Sambalpur to Cuttack.

But the pigeons really proved themselves when technology failed.

1982: Floods cut off the town of Banki. For a time, the pigeon service is the only line of communication with the outside world.

October 1999: A super cyclone smashes into Odisha, one of the worst storms ever recorded in the region. Power lines and radio networks go down. The police pigeons keep flying, carrying messages through the disaster and the floods that follow.

When phones and wireless became reliable, the pigeon post was gradually retired. But Odisha Police never let go of its birds. They are still bred and cared for in Cuttack, and they still fly ceremonial messages today.

Sometimes the most robust network is the one with feathers. 🕊️

📚 Sources:
• The Better India, "Odisha Police Pigeon Service": https://t.co/2hd1JUAHp3
• Homegrown, "India's First Pigeon Postal Service Is In Odisha": https://t.co/2kyxCneOIZ
• Sambad English, Odisha's police pigeon service at the Nyaya Sanhita exhibition: https://t.co/RXueApNGLE
• The Asian Age, "Carrier pigeons of Odisha showcase flawless skills": https://t.co/UiOHzNoP2x

🔜 Next episode: can a pigeon do maths? Scientists put them to the test, and the results put them on par with monkeys. 🔢

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

REUTERS: The news empire that began with pigeons 🕊️📰

1850. Paul Julius Reuter has a problem, and an opportunity.

A new telegraph line connects Berlin to Aachen. Another network serves Brussels. But between Aachen and Brussels there's a gap of roughly 75 miles with no wire at all. By road, a message takes six to seven hours. By train, even longer.

For bankers and traders, those hours are worth a fortune.

So on 24 April 1850, Reuter signs a contract with Heinrich Geller, an Aachen brewer, baker and pigeon breeder. Geller supplies 45 trained homing pigeons. Every day, birds are sent by train to Brussels. Every day, they fly home to Aachen carrying the latest stock prices.

By July, Geller has put his entire flock of more than 200 pigeons at Reuter's disposal.

There's a legend, too: that Reuter locked his Aachen subscribers in his office so that they all received the market news at exactly the same moment. Historians say it's often told, and never denied.

The honest twist: no surviving document actually records a pigeon flight. The contract exists. The birds existed. Reuters' own historians call it "almost certain" that they flew.

On 2 October 1850, the telegraph line from Aachen to Verviers opened, and the gap began to close. Reuter moved on to London, where he founded the agency that still carries his name.

Today Reuters is one of the biggest news agencies in the world. Its first network may have had feathers. 🕊️

📚 Sources:
• The Baron (Reuters history archive), "Enter Heinrich Geller, stage right": https://t.co/HE5p2CgmSA
• The Baron, "How they brought the good news": https://t.co/PsGSo3i5xX
• History of Information, Paul Julius Reuter: https://t.co/WNnSsGjBgx
• New World Encyclopedia, Paul Julius Reuter: https://t.co/dwYH2JU6Y7

🔜 Next episode: a police force in India that kept sending messages by pigeon until the 21st century, and the storm in which the birds got through when everything else failed. 🌀

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

How does a pigeon find its way home? 🧭🕊️

Drive a homing pigeon hundreds of kilometres away, in a closed box, to a place it has never seen. Let it go. It circles once or twice… and heads for home.

How? After more than a century of research, scientists still don't fully agree. But they have found some astonishing clues.

☀️ A built-in sun compass
Pigeons use the sun's position to tell direction, and they correct for the time of day with their internal clock. Shift a pigeon's body clock by a few hours, and on a sunny day it flies off in the wrong direction, by a predictable angle.

🧲 A magnetic sense
In 1971, Cornell biologist William Keeton glued small magnets to pigeons. On sunny days they still flew home fine. On overcast days, without the sun, they got lost. Without the sun, they seem to fall back on the Earth's magnetic field.

👃 A map made of smells?
In the 1970s, Italian researchers found that pigeons which couldn't smell often failed to home from unfamiliar places. The idea: pigeons learn the "smell landscape" around their loft. It's still hotly debated.

👂 Sounds we can't hear?
In 2013, USGS geologist Jonathan Hagstrum proposed that pigeons use infrasound, ultra-low sounds created by ocean waves. Pigeons can hear frequencies far below human hearing. He found that on days when pigeons mysteriously couldn't find home, weather conditions may have bent those sounds away from them.

🛣️ And sometimes… they just follow the road
In 2004, Oxford researchers tracked pigeons with GPS. On familiar routes, many simply followed motorways, turning at junctions and even going round roundabouts.

So the real answer is probably all of the above: a toolbox of senses, used in different combinations depending on the weather, the distance and how well the bird knows the area.

A brain the size of a peanut. A navigation system we still can't fully explain. 🤯

📚 Sources:
• NPR, "Birds May Use Sound Maps To Navigate Huge Distances" (2013): https://t.co/tIhiWXoGvd
• National Geographic, homing pigeon navigation (2013): https://t.co/fg1yRVnBfh
• Al Jazeera, "Secret of homing pigeons revealed" (2004, Oxford GPS study): https://t.co/xwlwwzWdkN
• Keeton (1971), "Magnets interfere with pigeon homing", PNAS
• Overview of the olfactory map debate: https://t.co/IfAhKkZe3X

🔜 Next episode: how one of the world's biggest news agencies began with a few dozen pigeons, flying stock prices between Germany and Belgium in 1850. 📰

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

@NetworkChuck @home_assistant @NousResearch Hermes, the original messenger, now running your smart home. Respect from a fellow carrier. 🕊️

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

@Cloudflare Neither. Bread. 🍞

Fuelling RFC 1149 packet delivery since 1990. 🕊️

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

ARMANDO: The €1.25 million pigeon 🕊️💶

How much would you pay for a pigeon? A few euros? An ordinary racing pigeon typically sells for a couple of thousand dollars.

In March 2019, a racing pigeon from Belgium went for €1,252,000.

His name was Armando. He was five years old and came from the loft of Joël and Dieter Verschoot in Ingelmunster, West Flanders. Pigeon racing experts considered him the best long-distance racing pigeon of all time. The BBC dubbed him "the Lewis Hamilton of pigeons". The head of the auction house went even further: "In football terms you have Messi and Ronaldo. It's that level."

The online auction was run by PIPA, a Belgian specialist. They had hoped for €400,000 to €500,000. Then two Chinese bidders went head to head, and in the final moments the price exploded past the "magical" one-million mark.

The previous record had been around €376,000, for a pigeon called Nadine.

Why would anyone pay that much? Armando had retired from racing. His real value was his genes: a top pigeon can father champions for years. Seven of his offspring sold in the same auction for about $24,000 each.

And the money is in China. Pigeon racing is hugely popular there, prize money can reach tens of thousands of dollars, and it has been described as the only sport people can legally bet on in mainland China.

Armando's record didn't last long, though. In November 2020, a two-year-old Belgian hen called New Kim sold for €1.6 million, the most expensive pigeon on record according to Guinness World Records.

So the next time a pigeon lands next to you, show some respect. It might be worth more than your house. 🏠

📚 Sources:
• Smithsonian Magazine, "Why Is This Pretty Little Pigeon Worth $1.4 Million?": https://t.co/JHNXxfRkL0
• TIME: https://t.co/FGzunNul53
• The Peninsula / AFP: https://t.co/KNNpl38D3L
• VRT NWS: https://t.co/RsIzhAOePY
• Guinness World Records, "Most expensive pigeon": https://t.co/WWX1OlShhS

🔜 Next episode: how does a pigeon find its way home from hundreds of kilometres away? The sun, the Earth's magnetic field, smells… and maybe even sounds we can't hear. Scientists are still arguing. 🧭

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

PARIS, 1870: The city that got its mail by pigeon 🕊️📜

19 September 1870. Prussian armies encircle Paris. Two million people are cut off from the world. The telegraph lines are cut, and no letter gets through.

So the Parisians look up.

Balloons begin lifting off from the besieged city, sailing over the enemy lines and carrying sacks of mail. On board: cages full of Paris homing pigeons. Their job is to fly back home with news from the outside world.

A pigeon can't carry much, though. That's where photographer René Dagron comes in. He escaped Paris by balloon himself, in the "Niépce". His second balloon, the "Daguerre", was shot down with all its equipment. He made it to Tours, the seat of the provincial government, and set up a remarkable workshop there.

His idea: photograph pages of messages and shrink them onto ultra-thin film. Each film measured about 11 × 6 mm and weighed about 0.05 grams. A single pigeon could carry up to 20 of them, rolled up in a feather quill tied to its tail. Historian Alistair Horne put it at up to 40,000 messages per bird.

Microfilm, in 1870.

In Paris, the films were laid between sheets of glass and projected onto a wall with a magic lantern. Clerks copied out every message by hand and delivered them across the city.

The cost was brutal. Of 302 pigeons sent off during the siege, only 59 made it back. The rest fell to hawks, cold, hunger, Prussian rifles, and sometimes the cooking pot. One bird released in Orléans in November finally landed in Paris on 6 February 1871, a week after the siege had ended.

Still, more than 100,000 messages reached the besieged city by pigeon. Military historians debate how much they mattered strategically. For the people of Paris, a few words from a mother, a son or a wife meant the world.

📚 Sources:
• History of Information, "René Dagron Operates the Pigeon Post into Paris": https://t.co/rvm7G69IRE
• UCLA Southern Regional Library Facility, "The Pigeon Post into Paris 1870–1871": https://t.co/mJywcMV9eG
• Alistair Horne, "The Fall of Paris" (excerpt): https://t.co/jIBPUPgMEn
• Microscopy UK, "A Message brought to Paris by Pigeon Post": https://t.co/cbdlMV0AET

🔜 Next episode: a racing pigeon called Armando, the "Lewis Hamilton of pigeons", and the auction that made him worth more than a house. 💶

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

Can a pigeon tell a Monet from a Picasso? 🎨🕊️

In 1995, psychologists Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto and Masumi Wakita at Keio University in Tokyo put it to the test.

They showed pigeons slides of paintings. Peck at a Picasso, and food arrives. Peck at a Monet, and nothing happens.

The pigeons learned it. Then came the real test: paintings by the two artists that the birds had never seen before. They still sorted them correctly.

It gets stranger. Shown works by other painters, the pigeons put Cézanne and Renoir with Monet, and Braque and Matisse with Picasso. They hadn't memorised pictures. They had learned a style: Impressionism versus Cubism.

One twist: turn the Monets upside down and the pigeons got confused. Upside-down Picassos didn't bother them at all.

The study earned the team the 1995 Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology, a prize for research that "first makes people laugh, and then makes them think." Watanabe later found that pigeons were about as good as university students at telling Van Gogh from Chagall.

To be fair, the birds aren't art lovers. They were working for food. But they can sort complex images into categories, the same talent that let pigeons learn to spot breast cancer on tissue slides (Episode 3).

Bird brain? More like art critic. 🖼️

(The paintings in our video are original artworks in the two styles, not real Monets or Picassos.)

📚 Sources:
• Watanabe, Sakamoto & Wakita (1995), "Pigeons' discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso", Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 63(2): 165–174
• https://t.co/v6sRcEZxwd, "Japan's Ig Nobel Prize Winners": https://t.co/TSxTApenzr
• Improbable Research (Ig Nobel organisers): https://t.co/oG3WE7AwDp
• Watanabe (2001), Animal Cognition, Van Gogh vs. Chagall

🔜 Next episode: 1870, Paris under siege. A city cut off from the world, and pigeons carrying letters shrunk so small that a single bird could carry thousands. 📜

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

@mberndtgen Ha, same reaction here. How did you stumble onto RFC 1149? Most people find it via the April Fools RFCs and never recover.

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

Fun fact: a single Pigeongram stamp on its original flimsy can sell for up to $20,000. Feathers > fiber.

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

THE PIGEONGRAM: When pigeons were an island's internet 📮

October 1894. In thick fog, the steamer SS Wairarapa smashes into the cliffs of Great Barrier Island, off Auckland, New Zealand. More than 120 people die.

The island has no telegraph, only a weekly steamer. The news takes three days to reach Auckland.

Two years later, a New Zealand Herald reporter visits the island and takes along a pigeon called Ariel. He ties five pages of his story to her and lets her go. She is home in Auckland in about 1¾ hours.

The idea takes off, literally. From 1897, regular pigeon mail flies the roughly 60 miles across the sea to the mainland. Soon there are two rival services: Walter Fricker's Great Barrier Pigeongram Agency, and the Original Great Barrier Pigeon-gram Service of J. E. Parkin, later run by S. H. Howie.

Messages were written on ultra-thin paper "flimsies", wrapped around a pigeon's leg and protected by a waterproof cover. They carried mining claims, election results, shopping lists, hotel bookings, urgent calls for a doctor, and even news of Queen Victoria's death.

And then the competitors did something new: they printed their own stamps. Parkin and Howie's 1898 issue may well be the world's first airmail stamps. Fricker answered with triangular ones.

In 1908 a telegraph cable finally reached the island, and the pigeons were retired.

Today a single Pigeongram stamp sells for over $100. The rarest go for thousands, and one still attached to its original flimsy can fetch up to $20,000.

Airmail didn't start with airplanes. It started with feathers. 🕊️

📚 Sources:
• NZ Geographic, "Pigeon post": https://t.co/VPdXaZmtry
• Smithsonian Magazine: https://t.co/8lEIFifTRC
• NZ Department of Conservation, SS Wairarapa: https://t.co/qiDn4oowV9
• Te Ara, Pigeon post stamps: https://t.co/4qHM4zje4u
• Ohinemuri Journal 27 (1983): https://t.co/B6ffDQb8Dg

🔜 Next episode: pigeons in an art gallery. In 1995, scientists trained pigeons to tell a Monet from a Picasso, and won a prize for it. 🎨

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

The full story, with all sources, is now also on Telegram 📖 https://t.co/Yd548Go3ze

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

🕊️ Extraordinary Carrier Pigeons, Part I : G.I. Joe

October 18, 1943, Italy. British troops capture the village of Calvi Vecchia ahead of schedule – but an American air raid on that very village is already planned, and radio can't stop it. Only one messenger is left: a pigeon.

G.I. Joe of the U.S. Army Pigeon Service (USA43SC6390) flies about 20 miles in roughly 20 minutes to the airfield. He arrives just as the bombers are preparing to take off. The raid is called off.

At least 100 soldiers of the British 169th (London) Infantry Brigade – and the villagers of Calvi Vecchia – are saved.

🏅 On November 4, 1946, at the Tower of London, G.I. Joe receives the Dickin Medal, often called the "Victoria Cross for animals". He is the first non-British animal to be honored with it. His citation: "the most outstanding flight by a USA army pigeon in World War II."

After the war, he lived with 24 other hero pigeons at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and later at the Detroit Zoo. He died in 1961, aged 18. In 2019, he was posthumously awarded the Animals in War & Peace Medal of Bravery.

📚 Sources:
- G.I. Joe (pigeon) – Wikipedia: https://t.co/QVGKua62yt
- G.I. Joe – PDSA Dickin Medal: https://t.co/xKnQJIC9nU
- Animals in War and Peace – U.S. Army: https://t.co/n9OYSWn5b8
- New Jersey's War Hero Pigeon – Mental Floss: https://t.co/W3C8kWEIK8

#CarrierPigeons #History #WWII #AnimalHeroes

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

@teamreal321 Radio failed. The pigeon didn't. G.I. Joe saved over 100 lives that day and later received the Dickin Medal.

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

@bluetouff Estimate: $4,000. Final price: $24,600. Best performing packet in internet history.

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

WINKIE: The pigeon who came home without a message 🕊️

23 February 1942. A Bristol Beaufort of No. 42 Squadron RAF is flying home from a strike off the Norwegian coast when its port engine explodes. At just 500 feet there’s no time to do anything but ditch. The bomber hits the freezing North Sea.

Four men scramble into a dinghy. Their SOS is too weak to fix a position. Nobody knows where they are.

On board were two homing pigeons. One carried the crew’s position, and was never seen again. The other, a blue chequer hen called Winkie, was released in the chaos with no message at all.

She flew anyway: through winter weather, across more than 120 miles of open sea. The next morning her owner, George Ross, found her in his loft in Broughty Ferry near Dundee. She was exhausted and her feathers were smeared with oil.

Her arrival WAS the message.

Ross alerted RAF Leuchars. With no coordinates, the RAF worked backwards from three clues: the time since the crash, the wind direction, and how much the oil on her feathers would have slowed her down. Shipping control knew of only one tanker in the North Sea, which was probably where she had rested. A rescue was launched within 15 minutes of her return. A search aircraft spotted the dinghy, and a high-speed launch brought all four men home.

The crew threw a dinner in her honour. Winkie was the guest of honour, watching from her cage.

On 2 December 1943 she received the very first PDSA Dickin Medal, “the animals’ Victoria Cross”:
“For delivering a message under exceptionally difficult conditions and so contributing to the rescue of an Air Crew, while serving with the RAF in February, 1942.”
Today Winkie and her medal are on display at The McManus in Dundee.

Sometimes the message isn’t on the leg. Sometimes the message is simply: I made it home.

📚 Sources:

RAF Lossiemouth, “The History of 42: Winkie the Pigeon”: https://t.co/jxxeCFRi0b

PDSA, “Winkie – DM 1”: https://t.co/zWL1Kq2RPM
The Courier, “Winkie, the Broughty Ferry homing pigeon”: https://t.co/YyUY6PLAs2
The McManus, Dundee: https://t.co/7JoA6u8GMT
🔜 Next episode: no war, no medals. Just a tiny island, a deadly shipwreck, and a pigeon service that may have produced the world’s first airmail stamps. Meet the Great Barrier Pigeongram. 📮

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

🕊️ Extraordinary Carrier Pigeons, Part X: The Pigeon Pathologists

No war this time. No bullets. Just a lab, a touchscreen – and a question nobody expected to ask: can a pigeon spot breast cancer?

In 2015, researchers at the University of Iowa and UC Davis put it to the test. Pigeons were shown microscope images of breast tissue on a touchscreen. Below each image: a blue and a yellow button. Benign or malignant? Peck the right one – get a food pellet. Peck the wrong one – try again.

On day one, the birds were guessing: 50%. Fifteen days later, they were right about 85% of the time.

Then came the real surprise. Shown images they had never seen before, they still got about 85% right. They hadn't memorized the pictures. They had learned what cancer looks like.

And when the researchers combined the votes of four pigeons into one "flock" verdict, the result was almost perfect: 99%.

The pigeons even learned to spot tiny calcium deposits on mammograms, an early warning sign of cancer. Where they failed: judging suspicious masses on mammograms. That task is hard for human experts too.

The scientists were clear: pigeons won't replace doctors. But a bird brain the size of a fingertip can help researchers test how medical images should look so that humans read them better.

🔜 Next time: February 1942. A bomber crashes into the icy North Sea. Four men in a dinghy, no radio, more than 100 miles from home. Their only hope: a pigeon covered in oil, named Winkie.

📚 Sources:
- Levenson, Krupinski, Navarro & Wasserman (2015), "Pigeons (Columba livia) as Trainable Observers of Pathology and Radiology Breast Cancer Images", PLOS ONE: https://t.co/CE3VHYN9gj
- University of Iowa – "One very brainy bird": https://t.co/BW1tYgaNBm

#Pigeons #Science #BreastCancer #AnimalIntelligence

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

🕊️ Extraordinary Carrier Pigeons, Part II : Cher Ami

October 4, 1918. Argonne Forest, France. More than 500 American soldiers are trapped behind German lines – the "Lost Battalion" under Major Charles Whittlesey. Then shells start falling on them. From their own artillery.

Runners don't get through. The men have one chance left: a pigeon named Cher Ami.

German soldiers open fire as he takes off. A bullet tears through his breast, his right leg is shattered. He keeps flying – and reaches his loft behind the lines about an hour later. Hanging from what is left of his leg is a small capsule:

"We are along the road parallel 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake stop it."

The barrage stops. Days later, the survivors – fewer than 200 of them – are rescued.

Army medics save Cher Ami's life, but not his leg. France awards him the Croix de Guerre with palm. He dies of his wounds in June 1919 and is on display today at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

A twist: for a century, some records called Cher Ami a hen. In 2021, a Smithsonian DNA test settled it – he was a male.

🔜 Next time: no war, no bullets. Pigeons that learned to spot breast cancer on medical images – almost as well as trained doctors.

📚 Sources:
- Cher Ami – Smithsonian National Museum of American History: https://t.co/KJ8K0XRBBp
- Century-old mystery solved: Cher Ami – U.S. Army: https://t.co/7OCWk9sGws

#CarrierPigeons #History #WWI #AnimalHeroes

[Packet Pigeon @PacketPigeon]

That’s the heartbreaking part. So many of those flights were never recorded, and so many pigeons never came home. But every one of them was sent out with the hope of saving lives, and sometimes one tiny bird was all that stood between a hundred men and disaster. Hard as it is to say, that made every flight worth it. The ones who never returned deserve to be remembered just as much as G.I. Joe. And Cher Ami’s story is just as heartbreaking, a true testament to courage and the will to keep going against all odds.