FACTORALY - E124 PIGEONS

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Pigeons are often described as the rats of the skies, but they play their role in our ecosystem - and they've played their part in wars, too - and even received medals for it!This episode is all about these misunderstood doves. As always, go to the blog at factoraly.com to learn more from the loft that is Factoraly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Hello, Simon. How are you doing? I'm very well, thank you, sir. How are you? I'm excellent. Thank you very much. Jolly good to hear. And hello to everyone listening to us. We hope you are all equally well. Hi, guys. So, in case you're new to this, we are Bruce Fielding. And we are also Simon Wells.

Not necessarily in that order. We're a couple of professional voiceover artists. That we are. And in our spare time, we are absolute complete and are to confirm. nerds. Sadly. Do you have the license? I had to go to the post office and get my nerd license. I had mine revoked. I was too nerdy. We love random facts. We love trivia. We love pub quizzes and the like. We love knowing stuff that is completely and utterly useless. Yep. Sometimes it stays in the memory banks. Sometimes the important stuff falls out as the less

important stuff comes in. So what happens is we have a subject picker and there's about 500 different subjects on the subject picker. We don't know which subject's going to come up next. And then sometimes they come up and we try and make a boring subject interesting, or we try and make an interesting subject half an hour long. Yes. And this one is kind of like falls in the middle. Yes, it's somewhere in between the two, isn't it? Yeah, because pigeons, right?

Pigeons, yes, in case you hadn't read the title. We're doing an episode on pigeons today. This is pigeons. Now, a lot of people go, when I say I'm doing an episode on pigeons, they go, ugh. Right, yes. It's like the rats of the air. I hate pigeons. Absolutely.

Yeah. Garstic creatures. Yeah. But there are people who quite literally fancy pigeons. Yes, they do. There are pigeon fanciers. Have you seen John Wick? No, I haven't.

Okay. So in John Wick, there is one of the characters who keeps pigeons on a roof. Oh, I see. Right, okay. And there's actually quite a few in films. There's quite a few people keeping pigeons on roofs and things. Yes, I think there's a German fellow who keeps pigeons in a pigeon loft in the producers, isn't there? Yes, that's right.

I remember, I don't know if I can remember the last time I saw a pigeon loft, but I remember growing up in Wonsworth. There were a few pigeon lofts. I thought you were about to say I grew up in a pigeon loft. I grew up in a pigeon loft. I'm quite tall. It was quite cramped. We automatically think of the street pigeon, the nasty, club-footed, disease-carrying thing. Yes. Being fed breadcrumbs by tourists in Trafalgar Square. Yes, exactly. that, pooing all over the place.

Yes. Yeah, nasty. However, there are over 350 varieties of pigeon and dove in the world. I was going to say, what's the difference between a pigeon and a dove? Not much. Okay. Essentially, as far as I can figure out, they're all pigeons. The varieties of pigeons that are a bit smaller and a bit more delicate and a bit

prettier, some people have over the years termed doves. Right. But they're all part of the same family, which is to say the Columbus, I'm a columbadai family, which is a gorgeous word. Good word. And it contains pigeons and doves. So there are 350 odd species around the world. There are only five native Columbidae members in the UK.

Okay, let me see if I can guess one. Go on. Wood. Very good, yes, wood is one. Okay, that's the one I can guess. That's it. Okay. So we have wood pigeons. We have collared doves.

Oh, yes. We have turtle doves. They get around at Christmas, now they can't. They do. Only two of them. We have stock doves, which looks so much like a pigeon you'd be hard-pressed to notice that it isn't. Right. It's got a slightly different coloured sheen on its neck.

Okay. Not much difference at all. And the dirty, nasty things that we all know, they're called feral pigeons. They're essentially a descendant of something called a rock dove. Oh, okay. So there are still wild, pure rock doves in the UK, but they're mostly scattered around the outer Hebrides and Scottish islands and things like that. But those things have bred and interbred and been mixed with other types of pigeon and dove and things

until they have become what we see in the cities now, which are generally known as feral pigeons, but they're all descendants of the rock dove. Okay. So you're saying there's no real difference between a dove and a pigeon, just a nomenclature and, you know. The thing is, you can hear about the release of like a hundred white doves. Yes, exactly, yeah.

Scientifically, there is no difference between a pigeon and a dove. Okay. It is all about the naming. If you find a small, delicate pigeon, it's called a dove. If you see a large chunky dove, it's sometimes called a pigeon. Right. Our pigeons are related to rock doves, which is not a dove. It's a pigeon.

There's no real difference. All of those things sort of have the same Latin scientific name. There's not really a difference. Therefore, I'm lumping them in together. The thing is, the pigeon of peace doesn't really sound very good. No, it doesn't. No. A peace pigeon sounds naff.

Yes. Prince did not write a song called When the Pigeons Cry. It just doesn't work. No. So even the beautiful white doves, there are varieties of white dove in the world. There are things called fantail doves from the Americas and so on. Yes. But when you go for a ride out in the English countryside and you see a beautiful little dove cart and it's festooned with perfect little white doves,

those are just white varieties of the descendants of the rock dove that have been bred together with other particularly white varieties in order to make these beautiful white birds. They're domesticated. They're not actually a species. Okay, what about the word pigeon? Oh, right. So the word pigeon, we've jumped straight over the etymology.

The word pigeon... We leapt the... Actually, we flapped. We flew over it. The word pigeon comes from the Latin word PIPO. That's an old MacDonald thing. isn't it? P-I-P-I-O, yes so it is. A Latin word, which means a young chirping bird.

Okay. Especially used for young birds of the Columbidae family. Yes. That turned into French pigeon. That turned into English pigeon. Oh, that simple. That was it. Okay.

Easy. And what about dove? No idea. Didn't look that up. Let's keep it to pigeons, because otherwise it's going to get very confusing. It's going to get very messy, yes. Yeah. Now, you mentioned wood pigeons earlier.

Yes, they're delicious apparently. I've never had pigeon. Have you ever had pigeon? I've never had pigeon. Not to my knowledge, anyway. You may have accident. Well, if you've had a game pie, they sometimes throw them in, don't they? Yes.

Just for fun. Wood pigeons are the big plump, pink-chested things that you see in your garden, the really big fat ones with the yellow beady eyes. Yes. Now, I, again, my bird watcher head on here. Pigeon songs. the noises they make. I remember for years and years and years,

I could never tell the difference between the sound of a wood pigeon and the sound of a collared dove. They're very similar. I think you're about to say something, which I'm about to go coup to. Yes, quite possibly. Go. Right.

Apologies for terrible bird impersonations here. The wood pigeon goes, who-hoo, who-who-hoo, and repeats that phrase. Yes. The collared dove goes, who, who, who, and repeats the phrase. So it's two fewer syllables. Coo.

Indeed. For my entire birdwatching life, I was never able to remember which one was which. I knew I was hearing one, but couldn't remember which one. So the collard dove is the short one. The collard dove is the short one. And the way I remember this now, and I may be about to completely ruin everyone's experience of going out for a drive in the countryside, there was a very, very irritating video on YouTube a handful of years ago, where someone had superimposed a picture of the pigeon with a pair of human

lips and put the words underneath, my toe hurts Betty, my toe hurts Betty. And I therefore now remember that that phrase goes with a pigeon and therefore the other one is the collared dove. I can't hear a pigeon anymore without thinking that. So sorry slash not sorry everyone. There are interesting things about pigeons. Go on, man. What have you found? I discovered, which is what interesting, you know, which came first chicken or the egg.

So which came first to pigeon on the egg? The interesting thing about pigeons is that they can't lay eggs unless they're in the presence of another pigeon. Well, they sort of get anti-stage fright. Well, yeah, I guess it's like the pigeon calls the midwife. Great. So, yeah, so a pigeon can't give birth without a midwife. Isn't that interesting? Even if the midwife happens to be just any old pigeon just standing around.

Yeah, it just happens to be passing by. Yes. That's incredible. I say give birth, they can't lay eggs. Sure. You know that old adage of why on earth have I never seen a baby pigeon? Yes. Totally erroneous.

The fact is we've very rarely seen a baby anything. Pigeons are particularly good at, well, especially city pigeons, are particularly good at nesting up in rafters and cloisters and beams and under bridges and so on. Therefore, you always look at their nest from underneath and therefore, why would you see the baby? But that's the case for any bird, really. That makes total sense now. Yeah. They've been used to all sorts of things, though.

Like carrying messages is a big deal for pigeons. So the carrier pigeon is a big thing. They have a ring on their leg and you put a very small piece of paper in the ring. on their leg and then the homing instinct of the pigeon, which I haven't, I don't know if you've done any research on this. I have done a bit on that. Oh, cool. So Simon will after this explain how pigeons find their way home. But that's what they use to send messages. And after Simon explains how they do it, I'll tell you a bit more about what happens when they do it. Insert the science here. So pigeons... It's magnets in their head, right? Essentially, yeah. Is it? We're more or less, yeah.

No, really? Yeah. So this is pretty much all birds navigate by sensing the Earth's electromagnetic field. Right. There are various theories, but one of them is that there are tiny, tiny iron particles in the inner ear of the bird, and that sort of aligns them to the magnetic field. But all birds do that. That's not unusual.

Okay. A lot of birds actually recognize geographical features and landmarks, so they know their route, if they fly it off. enough, that's not unusual. What pigeons do, and it's specifically again, it's the descendants of the rock doves, so it is only the city pigeons that do this. They have a really good sense

of smell. If you look at a pigeon, it's got really big nostrils. Yes, I guess. So they do all the things that the other birds do, but they also have a good sense of smell and some suggest that that's what they use to sort of navigate their way around. Oh, cool. I may remember where they've

come from. So as I sort of work it up, they're kind of carried away to a far place and then released and they're timed on how long it takes for them to return back to their roost. Roost? Roost. Yeah. It's exactly that.

This troubled me for ages. I thought, how on earth does a pigeon know to send a message to this particular headquarters rather than that particular headquarters? Yes. It doesn't at all. You take a pigeon away from its home. You take it to wherever it is, the battlefield or, I don't know, another location where you're having a pigeon race.

you open the box the pigeon flies home. If you strap a message to its leg, then it takes that message home. Yeah. Simple as that. Eventually, over the years, they were trained to go both ways, so they would have their nest in one location, but they would only get their food in another location. So they would fly back and forth between those two

and therefore be able to send messages back and forth. Right. But yes, that's all it is. It's just a homing instinct. So they're not really brave. I mean, there are pigeons who have had medals essentially for bravery. Oh, I see, yes. So during World War II, they used pigeons to get messages to various places.

There were a couple of famous ones for D-Day and things like that. So there's one called Winky and one called G.I. Joe. Oh, that's a great name for a pigeon. Yeah. And they saved thousands of lives, these pigeons. The war pigeons earned... There's a thing called a Dickin Medal for Gallantry, which is kind of like the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Right, okay.

And they got 32 Dickin medals, pigeons. No way. Yeah. And they were in North Africa, Europe, all sorts of things. And they were delivering messages. And they, if an air crew was down, they could send messages back when, you know, when radios and telephone lines were out. The G.I. Joe one is fantastic. He warned of a pending bombing in Italy, and he saved over about a thousand troops in Italy just by sending a message back saying,

where you are is going to be bombed, take cover or move away. Some of them were fitted with cameras, and they took reconnaissance photos. Oh, that's great. There's one called Mary of Exeter who got a Dickin Medal. That's such a pompous name for a vision. I know, Mary of Exeter. They used about a quarter of a million pigeons. Well, Britain used about a quarter of a million.

The Americans used about 54,000. Gosh. And there was the National Pigeons Service, which supplied the birds. Right. And they carried on going until the 1950s. They even had a pigeon-guided missile. I beg your pardon. So the pigeon-guided missile was very interesting.

What they did was they trained them up. to go for food when they saw something in the water. Right. So they would peck at the food to sort of signal that they then got fed when they saw something in the water. And so they put pigeons inside missiles and when they saw a boat in the water, they would peck at a screen to get to the food. And the screen kind of was a way of direct. the missile.

Wow. They didn't work that well, but they were okay. That sounds so comical. Yeah. I mean, there were ones that went, the Americans tried to train pigeons to set fire to Japanese hangars by sort of like flying into the hangar.

Unfortunately, they trained them on American hangers. So what they would do is they would put like small bombs or sort of incendiaries on the backs of the pigeons. I remember you saying that they did that with bats, sort of strapping napalm to bat. They did, yeah. And they also tried it with pigeons, and it also ended equally badly. Oh, dear.

As soon as I hear anything about a carrier pigeon during the war, I instantly think of black other. Whenever you breathe, you instantly think of a blackadder. There's a particular episode when they're in the trenches. Meltchit has a pigeon called Speckled Gym. Yes. Which blackadder shoots down and gets into trouble for. And there's a wonderful line you said about sort of carrier pigeons term. One of them says, it's the king's own carrier pigeon.

Bordrick says, nah, that pigeon could never carry the king. But they've been used that way for a really long time. And we sort of talk about the first and second world wars. Yes. Apparently, homing pigeons were used in ancient Egypt. Really? To carry messages to and fro. Wow.

Napoleon used pigeons during his way. wars, as did we, you know, on both sides. And did you say the word pigeon post or did I make that up? You made that up, but I'll say it now. Pigeon Post. Very good. So there was actually Pigeon Post. This was a regular mail service even in peacetime. Wow. Nothing to do with war. Is this on like that airmail paper, that really thin sort of? Yeah. Really thin paper rolled up very, very tightly, strapped to the pigeon's leg. And it was used. in the 12th century. There was a regular pigeon post service

between Baghdad and Syria in the 12th century. We started using it. The rest of Europe sort of started using it around the 1700s. New Zealand had something called a pigeon gram.

They actually had a regular pigeon mail service. They released air mail stamps to prove that the letter had been paid for. Had a little picture of a pigeon on it. Pigeons were used to carry the news of who won

the ancient Olympics. Pliny the Elder wrote about homing pigeons around the first century obviously. Pliny. Pliny. Pinch of salt. But yeah, so they've been used for a very, very long time. I think you said earlier on there was a particular military service

was still using them up until the 1950s. Yes, that's correct. The Swiss army only stopped using pigeon post in 1994. There was a particular police department in India was still using them in 2002. Goodness me. It's bonkers.

I mean, were they often stopped, you know, the messages kind of like captured and things? I didn't find any evidence of it, but you'd like to assume that, you know, every now and then there's someone just shoots down a pigeon in case. Or was flying after it with their dog. Oh, I see where you're going. I mean, a lot of people think I laugh like Muttley anyway. Yes. But yeah, so after wacky races, Dick Dastardly and Muttley had their own TV thing.

Well, with a few other characters. Called Stop That Pigeon. It was a great cartoon. I remember it fondly, yeah. That's really good. It's basically about a messenger pigeon who's being like attacked by these dastardly characters and messages. trying to be captured.

I don't remember any of the context. I don't sort of remember there being any kind of political partisan. You know, whose side were they on? Whose side was the pigeon on? Well, obviously, Dastardly and Muttley were probably baddies. Yes, and therefore the carrier pigeon was a good idea. With the vulture squadron. That's right.

Tell the Vodger Squadron. Gosh, the things that do you remember. So useless. Wow. There was a cartoon when I was a lad called Pigeon Street. Okay. which was a lovely, lovely little cartoon. Yeah, pigeons get everywhere.

They do. Well, they get everywhere in Brazil. Do they, indeed? Yeah. So Brazil likes pigeons. Right. The capital, Brasilia, actually has pigeon houses. Okay.

So when they build a development of houses, they build coupes or whatever you call them. You get dovecots, don't you? Oh, yes. Pigeon holes. Pigeon. I suppose so, yeah. I guess. So they build in like pigeon accommodation into new developments.

So there's always run for pigeons. I suppose it saves them sitting on the roofs and pooping everywhere, doesn't it? Well, you say that, but pigeon poop, very useful stuff. Is it? When gunpowder was obtained from China, one of the ways that you can get, is it potassium nitrate? It is potassium nitrate, yeah. is from guano, from pigeon poop.

So pigeon poop was actually royal. This is such a bizarre fact. All pigeon poop belonged to the king. Yeah. So this was George I made this proclamation declaring that, yeah, all pigeon poo was property of the crown. Isn't that crazy? That was bizarre.

How did we look into that? It's one of those random facts that I've sort of known in the back of my mind but never looked at. Potassium nitrate, also known as saltpetre, which, total side, salt peter comes from the Latin salpetra which means salt of the rock because where salt peter occurs naturally it kind of looks like salt crystals and it often grows on rock but in very small quantities very hard to harvest

naturally but if you get either either poo or urine actually they used to use human urine in the middle ages you get soil that is very very full of nitrate and then salt peter sort of grows on that soil so you can manufacture it And, yeah, pigeon poo, very, very full of nitrates and very good at creating this stuff. So it sort of became an industry. There were armed guards posted around dovecots and pigeon lofts to make sure people didn't steal them.

Can you imagine down the pub? Oh, I see George's got a new job. Yeah. Oh, what's he doing? He's a guard. He's an armed guard. Oh, what's he guarding? I don't want to say.

He's never told us. Yeah. There were people called saltpetre men Whose job it was to go around shoveling this stuff In order to create saltpeter How wild Yeah crazy But also not just gumpowder

But also it's fertiliser Very rich Yeah Obviously you need a lot But very good fertiliser Yeah Can you imagine that now I imagine all of the pigeon poo there is in central London

You can imagine a royal official Going round shoveling it up Very old. Well, you talk about pigeons in London. Yes. Did you know that pigeons have learned to use the underground? No. Yes.

So pigeons have actually worked out that to get from one place to another in London, specifically from their roost to wherever it is that they're going. Yeah. They can take the tube. So you occasionally get a pigeon inside a carriage, but generally speaking, they can't just hang on to the middle bit between carriages. Right. And cadge a lift.

That's bizarre. I've actually seen a pigeon on a train, not underground, but otherwise. Yes. I assumed it was just there by mistake. It's sort of flown in through the open door and couldn't get out again. No, it's commuting. That's brilliant. It had a freedom pass and everything.

Pigeon pass. Oh, that's brilliant. The other piece of popular culture that I sort of recognise using pigeons is, um, Do you remember the TV series lasted the summer wine? Yes, yes. Nora Batty had a husband called Wally, and Wally was a pigeon fancier. Right.

He was always out with his pigeons, and that was a sort of a recurring gag. And again, I've never really thought much about that. I assumed maybe he was breeding them for messaging services. But there are entire groups of people called pigeon fanciers, and they breed pigeons, much like, you know, people breed dogs for crafts. Oh, wow.

There are national and international pigeon fancying exhibitions. And I just thought this was sort of a local... How do you pick between a good pigeon and an average pigeon? It's remarkably specific. They go on size, shape, plumpness of breast, quality of feather, colour, etc. You know, just like those people who sort of walk around a cattle market going, or that's got a nice haunch or whatever. Yes, yes.

But this is a huge, huge thing. The largest pigeon show ever held was in Nuremberg in 2006. They had 33 and a half thousand entrants. Well, you can imagine the royal value of that. Oh, criking. Can you imagine, yeah, gosh. And, yeah, this is a serious hobby for a lot of people. And I found that there are specific groups into which you can enter your pigeon.

bearing in mind we're not just talking about rock doves here you know 350 odd varieties of pigeon from around the world some of them are incredibly elaborate these groups you have asian feather and voice pigeons color pigeons frills and owls don't know how owls come into this homers and hens powders and croppers exhibition tumblers flying tumblers and high flyers and utility pigeons i don't know what any of that means bruce no but there's an entire industry of people. I'll tell you who does know. Who? Our blog. Oh, yes. So if you go to our show notes, which are on our blog at factorily.com. Factorily.com? Yes.

You will find a whole coop of information about pigeons. Yes, you will. Which will include, hopefully, what these various judging categories are. There you are. Wonderful. We've said that pigeons, you know, get awards for bravery. and that they're very good and they're very helpful. They're not always good. Aren't they?

Are they bad pigeons? No. There are bad pigeons. In 1963, a court in Tripoli found 75 pigeons guilty of smuggling and sentenced them to death. Oh, my goodness. I know. And I don't know what they were smuggling. That's weird, isn't it? Whatever it was, it can't have been very big.

No. I wonder how they put them to death. Well, it's a little. You put them into a firing line? Yes. Well, I imagine roasted over a slow fire. Yeah. If you know, a listener, why a Tripoli court would convict 75 pigeons of smuggling and sentenced them to death, we would love to hear from you.

Yes, we would. There must be someone out there who knows the answer to this. Yes. Pigeons are one of a handful of birds that can actually achieve vertical take-off. Oh, because when you go near them when you're walking through places they actually do take off back to see. There are a few birds that do

but not terribly many. Most sort of need a run up or a vertical drop or whatever. But if you watch a video, I'll tell you what, we'll put a video on the website I found a lovely slow motion video of a pigeon taking off. It squats down, it jumps up into the air, it opens its wings and it flaps really, really hard for a couple of flaps

creating downward thrust. It's kind of like a harry, a jump jet, really. Oh, right. And it just takes off vertically. They usually fly at an average of sort of 60 miles per hour. They can reach 70, 80, 90 miles per hour. That's probably why they're useful for messages and things in walks. Yes, they're quick.

Yeah. And in fact, that's why you get pigeon racing, I guess, because it was important that these messages got through quickly. And then one day someone must have said my pigeon's faster than your pigeon. No, they would say, I'll say what, my pigeon, my pigeon is fast as your pigeon. And this has probably gone on forever. Modern day pigeon racing was set up in the 1800s in Belgium. Okay.

With very strict rules and regulations and so on. And similar thing, you take your particular pigeons to a designated starting point, you let them all go. And people watch the skies and see whose pigeon gets home. first. Wow. And that's pigeon racing. I mean, how do they time when they get back to the coop? Is it, do they just trust? So you have, you have one person standing at the pigeon loft waiting with weighted breath and you have a colleague who drives the pigeons out to somewhere else and releases them. Yeah. So the person who's driven them out doesn't see them land and the person who stays back at home doesn't see them take off. But there's no like official that's kind of standing

behind him wearing a white lab coat. We'll come on to that later. Oh, okay. There is another sort of pigeon, which there was a song about when up in the 80s, which I quite like. There's a stool pigeon. Oh, yes, there is, yes. So stool pigeon is a slang term for somebody who rats out criminals. Oh, like an informant. Exactly.

So they belong to the gang, but they're talking to the police. Okay. But the origin of stool pigeon is quite interesting. It's a bit like a judas goat. So what you would do is you would take a pigeon with you on a pigeon hunt and you would sort of tie the pigeon to what was known as a stool. It's effectively a piece of wood or something that was slightly raised off the ground. Okay.

And you would tie the, so the pigeon would be tied to this piece of wood. And I wouldn't be able to get away and would flap about and sing out to its colleagues that there was a problem. And the fellow pigeons would come in and go, what's going on? So the stool pigeon would basically be there to get the other pigeons into the area where the hunters were. So the hunters could then shoot them. Gosh, I mean, that's barbaric and dastardly. But at the same time, that's quite clever.

Yes. I mean, in much the same way as the dude, where you tie a goat, if you want to catch a tiger. I don't think I'm familiar with this. A judas goat is basically where you tie a goat to the ground. And then you wait for the tiger to come along to eat the goat. And then you shoot the tiger. T-Rex doesn't want to be fed. He wants to hunt.

Well, I haven't quoted Jurassic Park for a while, actually. That feels good. I was thinking this is an episode with Blackadder and Jurassic Margaret. You must be in heaven. It's a double whammy. So earlier we talked about people in white lab coats and stopwatches. Yes. So I imagine that they were doing it to get a record of some sort.

Oh, well deduced, Bruce. Very good work. Yes, they were. So there are quite a lot of Guinness records for pigeons because it is such a hobby, you know, that there are people entering their birds for particular records. And this one is the fastest pigeon race. Okay. And indeed, it had an official from Guinness World Records sort of standing back at the roost,

waiting for the pigeons to come back. And it's very difficult to, you can't sort of hold a speed gun. up to a pigeon up in the sky. But you can't work out how far it's come in how much time. Exactly that, so that's what they did. And in 1965, there was a group of pigeons released in East Croydon by the East Anglian Federation Pigeon race. And 1,428 birds were released and then sent back to their original roosts.

And the first bird to get back, they calculated that it had achieved a speed of 110 miles per hour. But you said they only did 60? Right, so there was a nice prevailing tailwind. They averaged on a still day with no wind, they average about 60, 70 miles per hour. Right. With a decent tailwind, 90.

This one achieved 110, evidently. Wow. And the owner of the pigeon was a Mr. Vigin, which I assume is a coincidence. Vigin's pigeon. Vigin's pigeon, yeah, from Essex. So that's the record for the fastest pigeon. The record for the biggest pigeon, a variety called a Canadian giant runt.

A giant runt. That seems counterintuitive to me. Yes, yeah, it does, doesn't it? This bird was owned by a fellow from Ontario called Leonard Yek. And this pigeon weighed 1.86 kilograms, and it had a chest width, apparently when you measure a pigeon it's done in chest width. Okay. 12.7 centimetres, which is quite... A big chest for a pigeon.

And that was in March 1999, so that's the biggest pigeon. The largest ever race release, that is to say how many pigeons were simultaneously released in a race, was in Orleans in France in 1988, 215,000 pigeons. Sorry, a quarter of a million pigeons? Yeah, yeah. Okay. This was the Dutch national pigeon race in 1988. That's the largest number.

Can you imagine that? I mean, I get quite impressed when I see a flock of 100 jumping off the ground, you know. Yes. Cricy. Goodness me. And finally, the most expensive pigeon, it was a professional racing pigeon.

This bird, a lot of these birds have funny names. This bird was called New Kim from Belgium. It wasn't called New Kim. Not New Kim, no. New Kim as opposed to Old Kim. Okay. Two-year-old racing pigeon, sold for 1.4 million pounds.

For a pigeon. For a pigeon in 2020. So that's recent prices. We're in the wrong game. Come on. Let's ditch the voiceover career and start breeding pigeons. Start hatching. Well, I've run out of anything else to say about pigeons.

Yep. All of my pigeon-related facts have flown home to roost. Well, quite. Very quickly, apparently. Very quickly. Yes. Thank you so much for listening. Yes, thank you.

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