Stuff You Should Know - Pigeons: Homing, Passenger, Carrier and Otherwise

Episode Date: August 18, 2015

Pigeons can get a little confusing. Passengers, messengers, carriers, homing - the list goes on. But when it comes down to it, they're all variations of the same smart bird with a knack for getting home to roost. Learn about these clever creatures in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host.

I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HouseForks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, that was not Jerry, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I love that we have a new trend here of starting our animal-centric podcast with impressions of that animal, because you did your, what I thought was a dolphin, but it was a bat, and I just did a pigeon, which um...

That was a pretty good pigeon. Well, come on, go. Does, again, you just blew me away with your pigeon. Or a New York pigeon. Coo. I'm cooing here. Yeah, I'm cooing here. How's it going?

I feel ashamed all of a sudden. We've gotten a lot of requests for messenger pigeons over the years, and you said I'm going to heed the call and put together a nice little conglomerate of articles on it. And I thought it was super interesting and a bit confusing in terminology, because as we will soon divulge, or I guess we're about to, like messenger pigeons, homing pigeons. Different. Well, no, not really. Oh, yeah, the same.

Like a lot of it is just a different name for the same thing. Oh, you're right. I'm sorry. For those of you who chose the two that are the same. Right. All the others are different. Yeah. Homing pigeons and passenger pigeons, different.

Different. Carrier pigeons. Different than messenger pigeons, which is very confusing. It's all just confusing. Well, it's clear through the crud and the mire and the muck and get to the differences between types of pigeons, because most people do, when you think of a carrier pigeon chuck, you're probably lumping together a bunch of different pigeons into the same category. And you'd be right in a certain way in that most of the pigeons that we consider carrier

pigeons are descended from rock pigeons. Yeah. We don't want to be pigeon lumpers. No. Rock pigeons are different and beautiful in their own way. That's right. Rock pigeons originally named so from the rock dove, I believe, which they inhabited mountains and sea cliffs.

And I think that's why they were called rock. Sure. Pretty neat. That, or they love poison. That'd be glam rock pigeons. Hair rock. Hair rock pigeons. Glam rock.

No, not quite as... Glam rocks. Glam rock. Glam rock. Glam rock. Yeah. Glam rock to me was 70s. Hair rock was the 80s.

Right. Kind of bastardization of glam rock. Yes. Not nearly as good as like the New York Dolls, let's say. Sure. Right. You know? We're way better than Gary Glitter as it turns out in the end.

That's right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's forgot about that. Yeah. All right. Back to pigeons. We haven't even started yet.

No. They were all descended from rock pigeons. Kind of like... Do you remember our thoroughbred horse art episode? How can I forget? I love that one. Yeah. I didn't like it that much because it was dense for me.

There's a lot of information there. Yeah. The difference between thoroughbred horses and pigeons is that there's not that much information on pigeon lineages. Yeah. That's true. Despite the fact that some people show them, right? And this is where we finally arrive at carrier pigeons.

That's right. They are... As this article points out, fancy pigeons and their bred to show. They're ornamental. In very weird ways. Yeah. They have what's on their nose. If you look up a true carrier pigeon, you're going to see a lot of pictures of just homing

pigeons. Uh-huh. But look until you find one that looks like it has a rotten walnut on its nose. It looks like it's pecked into a teratoma and it's come out and just stuck around the bird's beak. Yeah. That's called a waddle sur. Waddle to two words, waddle dash sur, C-E-R-E.

Right. And it is a fleshy thing on the bill and they do say it resembles the texture of a walnut. And that's what it starts out as. They get big and even more gross looking. Yeah. And it's at the top of the bill, which is when you see one carrier pigeon with just one of these waddles on top of its beak, you're like, that's a little weird looking, but I've seen birds with that little growth right there before.

Sure. But sure, these waddles start popping up all around their beak and it's just grody. Like they have them beneath around the sides. It's gross. It's like a bird only a passenger lover fancier would love. Like they love these things, but most people when they see them are like, ooh, man, look at that. Right.

Yeah. And if you're showing carrier pigeons, like the pigeons like great, amazing waddle is something to be shown off and displayed. It's like a point of pride among the show where or not me, buddy, fancier, I say, cover that thing up. People, by the way, who like just kidding, who like pigeons and are into showing and raising and using pigeons for fun are called pigeon fanciers, by the way. Yeah.

I just said that. Oh, you did. Yeah. But I didn't explain it. I just slipped it in. Oh, okay. Well, I wanted to explain it. Yeah.

People probably like, why did Chuck just say fancier? Who does he think he is? Who does he think he's the king of England? No, but the carrier pigeon is the king of pigeons, according to fanciers. That is not bad. Pigeons were imported to the US from Europe in 1860 and by 1872, the first racing clubs were formed. Apparently, Philadelphia has or probably still do or had the largest concentration of fanciers

in the late 1800s and racing pigeons is a really big deal still. Yeah. The reason you can raise pigeons is that rock pigeon descendants, whether they be carrier, although I don't think I think carrier is the least strong of all of them, but especially homing and messenger pigeons, they're really fast. Yes. And they are capable of flying their way over very long distances. That's right.

And they find their way home because they return in general to their nest to mate. So this is why they return home. We'll get to how in a bit later. But like how to train them to do that? Well, how to train them in just how science has figured out that they do this is pretty remarkable. So they fly around 40 miles per hour on average, but can reach as high as 60. And apparently 100 to 300 miles is just a walk in the park for these guys and gals.

They have a record, I don't know if it's a documented record, but 1986, they verify that a homing pigeon named Charlie flew 4550 miles from the UK to Brazil. And he wasn't even supposed to. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Apparently he was in a race and I guess his nest was in Brazil originally and he figured it out and made his way there to Brazil, even though he was in a local race at the time in England.

That nuts. It's pretty nuts. So apparently the racing pigeons, and we could do, I mean, there's so much on racing pigeons that we're not even going to get to, aside from mentioning it, but the racing Homer is the specific type of pigeon that is bred to race because the Homer is the fastest, which is ironic if you're a Simpsons fan. Oh yeah. This Homer is not a fast guy.

Yeah. You know? No, he's really not. So homing pigeons are bred specifically to find their way home. I mean, they're good at it anyway, like you said, but they selectively breed these things if you're going to be a fancier to do so. And when you're racing a homing pigeon or something like that, basically what you're doing is you're taking it to a place away from its home.

Yeah. You smack it on the head. All right. With a little tiny hammer. Uh-huh. Say, wake up. Yeah. And don't do that to a pigeon if you're ever.

Just kidding. Don't do that. And then you release it and it will find its way back home and you release it at the same time as some other ones and whichever one finds its way home first is the winner. That's racing pigeons. But as you said, homing pigeons are really good at finding their way home naturally. Yes. But over time they've been selectively bred by humans to be the best of the best at this.

Right. Like compared to their wild ancestors, they make them look like utter poop. Yeah. Just like your basic rock pigeon. Yeah. Uh, so let's talk a little bit about the different theories on how they find their way home. There's some new findings and what they generally think now is it could be a combination of these things.

Yeah. Or like... It seems like an everybody wins hypothesis. Yeah. Basically. So the sun could be one way that they find their direction and just a general north-south east-west sort of way. Uh-huh.

When it's cloudy, the Earth's magnetic field, there's basically two different things going at work here. There's a compass. Right. And then there's the map. Right. And the compass is just your, sort of like just us. Like a general header and the map is actually like, where am I now and where do I need to

be? Yeah. Like I'm back in New York. I'm on 57th Street and I need to get down to the lower east side. Yeah. But the compass part is like so that I'm right now facing north, which means I need to turn around a little bit and go until I'm facing east. That's right.

And using my map, I have figured this out. Yeah. This one study, I didn't follow up on it. The one from Oxford that said they actually follow established roads at some point. Mm-hmm. Did you look into that anymore? No, I didn't see that. I wonder if that was just like a speculation that's been overturned or if they'd really

do follow like I-20. So the fact that we didn't run into that anywhere else makes me think like it's probably been abandoned. Yeah. It seemed, from what I can understand, the two main competing, longstanding competing explanations were, like you say, they're following magnetic lines in the Earth's magnetosphere. Yeah. Or they're following smells, tiny odor molecules that they use to basically as a trail of breadcrumbs

to lead them back toward their roost, their nest. Right. And for a long time, it was debated whether this was the case or not. The fact that they have such good compasses really lends a lot of credibility to the idea that they can follow magnetic lines and use those to orient themselves. And there's actually this anecdote from the early 80s that really lends a lot of support to the magnetic theory. Yeah.

And that is there was this one pigeon that was caught around a lake in Yellowstone. Oh, right. And by caught, I mean like it was seen for, I think a few weeks, like just flying in circles around this lake. Yeah, which is not what a home in pigeon is supposed to do. No, they fly straight and purposeful toward home, wherever they are. So this naturalist apparently, where did you find this article? Ew, I'm not sure which one this was in.

Audubon Society was one. Well, I mean, we've got them all posted on our website, right? Yeah. Okay. So this naturalist who wrote this article that we're talking about got ahold of this pigeon and he took it and cared for it and took it away from the lake and released it and the thing flew due east. And it was a North Carolina pigeon and it was out in Yellowstone.

So he said, you know what, this lake area has a really weird magnetic field. It's known for making compasses go haywire. So this lends a pretty decent amount of support to the magnetic line theory. Yeah, agreed. But it's been overturned recently or at least diminished as far as the smell theory, right? Well, I don't know about overturned. I think, again, it's like everyone wins. I think from what I ended up with was that they use all of these things when it's most

beneficial. Okay. Like they'll use one if it's like if the magnetic field is not as strong, then they'll go to one or the other tried and true methods. Like smell? Yeah. Smell was another one. And then recently sound, specifically infrasound, which are sound waves, super low frequency

that we can't hear them. There's a geophysicist named John Hagstrom that cooked up this idea and published it in the Journal of Experimental Biology. And he said basically he thinks that they hear their way home, which, you know, makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And apparently that pigeon back in the early 80s that was around Yellowstone, that lake in Yellowstone that was having a hard time, that phenomenon is called a release site bias.

In some places in the world, if you release a homing pigeon, they're going to have a hard time finding their way home or else they're going to end up getting stuck flying around in circles. And it's generally unexplained. So it's led to this whole subfield of study of homing pigeon maps and how they do this stuff. And this subsonic sound theory basically says that they follow basically sound maps. Yeah, sort of like echolocation is what it sounded like to me with bats.

Yeah, but they're just hearing. They're not like creating a sound and listening for the echo. They're just listening out for the sound. But they're almost listening out for sound in much the same way that they would follow, say, odorant molecules like a trail of brick crumbs. They're listening for familiar subsonic sounds. Yeah, as low as 0.05 Hertz. And like you said, he basically create a sound map and he basically compared it to the same

thing that we see when we look out with our eyeballs at something. Yeah. But they can hear it. Right. So they would see their home. The way we see our home when we're driving up to it, they hear their home and they know which way to go toward it. Yeah.

Yeah. If you could see what I hear. You ever seen that movie? No. Is that a lifetime movie? It could have been if there was a lifetime back then. It was an 80s movie. It was the guy that played the Beastmaster.

He played a very famous blind man who was a piano player and it was called If You Could See What I Hear. So I think blind people use sound in similar ways. Was it Blind Tom, the savant, was he a savant? No. I can't remember. He's sort of like a piano player, playboy type. I just remember seeing it on cable when I was a kid and I think Mark Singer was the guy.

Yeah. But I can't remember the real guy. But he was a real guy. Did you see or hear about the lifetime movie that Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell made? Oh yeah. And no one can figure out if it was like a piece of comedic genius or else if they were like serious or what? Well, no.

They figured it out. I mean, they basically went to make the movie and just said, let's just do this as straight up as we can, but because it's us, it'll just have that edge that, you know, like Will Ferrell being serious is one of the funniest things in the world. So it was comedic genius. Well, yeah, because it's them. But they weren't like, let's try and make this funny. They just said, let's do this as straight as possible.

I didn't know if both of them happened to have a family member who needed surgery at the same time. So they signed on to this project or what? It's pretty weird. Have you seen it? Yeah. I mean, it is tough because they are hysterical, but it's so straight. It's like, I don't know how to register this.

It says like the room or something like that. Well, well, that was just a bad movie that ended up being hysterical. But this isn't much the same. I got to see this. What the room? No, the other one. You got to see them both. I've seen the room.

Oh, okay. What's the Lifetime Movie one called? I can't remember. I guess if you just search Will Ferrell, Lifetime Movie, it'll come up. He does a lot of weird things. He did that Spanish language movie and he did that, the miniseries. He takes chances. Good for him.

He's in a position to do so. So I feel like this is a pretty good time to take a break, don't you? Yes, and re-gather ourselves. Yes, let's do that, starting now. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb

be her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So, I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is a risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we covered basically how they find their way home and the competing theories, and I think they all just lived together in one big happy family, because they haven't disproven in any way.

Oh, the theories, like the pigeons. Yeah, the pigeons do too. They like each other. But I don't think anyone has disproven anything, so at this point, I think they're taking all comers as far as those theories go. Yeah, so, and this is not specific to, is it specific to homing pigeons? Although it would include messenger pigeons, wouldn't it? And carrier pigeons, does it?

But not passenger pigeons, because they're all dead. The only difference between a messenger pigeon and a homing pigeon is that a messenger pigeon has something, either a tube on its leg or a little backpack that contains a message. I think the backpack is the new method, and they used to do the tube on the leg. I think the backpack is way cuter. Yeah, it's adorable. A little tiny backpack, you kidding? What I can't figure out is the difference between a messenger pigeon and a carrier pigeon.

Okay, so here's a carrier pigeon is not bred for flying. It's not bred for its homing abilities. It's not bred to race. Okay. It's not bred to send. It's basically the pecanese of pigeons. Okay, no, no, I got it, I got it. I'm just picturing them in my head, gotcha.

So carrier is confusing me because they're not actually carrying anything. No, that is why it's so confusing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of all of them, they should not have the word carrier attached. They should be like virtually useless pigeon with the horrible waddle on its beak. Right. That's the new name for carrier pigeons. Tiny pigeon hammer to talk them on the head.

No, that's homing pigeons. All right. So carrier pigeons are for show. Gotcha. They're the best in show of pigeons. So the homing pigeon is the one who carries a message. Generally, it's written on little tiny pieces of thin. That's the messenger pigeon, which is a homing pigeon that is carrying a message.

Exactly. Yeah, that's where we are. Okay, but I mean, it can get confusing. I'm sorry to correct you. I mean, to be pedantic. No, I think I just said messenger pigeon, didn't I? I don't remember. Okay.

Let's rewind and listen. At any rate, the messenger pigeon is a homing pigeon that carries a message. Right. And they have been around for a long time, Egypt, the Phoenicians, Romans. Noah. Yeah. Noah in the Bible. Yeah.

He was the first dude. Russell Crowe. I thought those were doves, but apparently I ran across a comment on it that dove and pigeon were interchangeable back then. Oh, really? They were in old timey Aramaic days. All right. Well, that makes sense.

Yeah. Apparently in ancient Rome, when they had chariot races, not just like a chariot race in a stadium, but like a long chariot race over a distance, they would send the passenger pigeon, I'm sorry. Oh man, here we go. The messenger pigeon's back with the news of who won. Yeah, right. So I could touch, you know, Brutus won this one.

Go tell them, everybody. Yeah. And more later, they would get there and everyone would be too drunk to realize that they cared. Yeah. At that point, Genghis Khan used them. He had like a whole system set up. Oh yeah.

We've never really talked about him, have we? Yeah, we have. Did we do an episode on that? Yeah. We did. Yeah. About whether I killed like a million people or something in one hour. I can't find that episode anywhere.

Oh, I'm pretty sure we covered it. I felt like we did too. Jerry's nodding, yes. Or either she's falling asleep and then waking up over and over again. So yeah, Genghis Khan had a whole system across Asia and Europe, like a relay system. Right. Pretty impressive. What else?

Germans used them, actually attached little cameras to their bellies. Oh, that was World War I. Yeah. So the modern use of messenger pigeons in warfare was actually, it seems to be started by the French. Yeah, and went all the way up through the Vietnam War. Yeah. And like the French love using messenger pigeons in a warlike setting, right?

Yes. And there was the siege of Paris. The Prussians were attacking Paris. And Paris was finally saved. There are reinforcements thanks to a group of carrier pigeons or messenger pigeons who got word that Paris was being, was under siege and they needed help and help arrived. And Paris was saved, as I've said a few times. That's right.

They were defeated and the pigeon was so beloved as a result that the same guy who created the Statue of Liberty also created a tribute to pigeons that was, that stood in Paris up until World War II when they melted it down. Because they needed the metal? I think so. Oh, really? So by the time World War I rolled around, pigeons were very much established as a very useful means of communication when all else failed in war.

Yeah. Apparently they're so fast that they're hard to shoot down. Yeah. And they get where they want to go in the case in France and, how do you pronounce it, M-A-R-N-E? Is it Marne? The Marne. The battle of the Marne.

There were 72 pigeon lofts and as they advanced forward, they took the lofts with them. A lot of the pigeons that were out carrying messages were out when they moved the lofts. Were out when they moved the lofts and were still able to find their lofts blind, not knowing where these lofts ended up. Amazing. Go pigeons. There were laws passed during wartime. This one, regulation 21A, shooting homing pigeons, killing wounding or molesting, gross, homing

pigeons, is punishable on the defense of the realm, regulations by six months imprisonment, or 100 pound fine. That's just a fine. In France, you could be executed for impeding a messenger pigeon. A wartime pigeon? Yeah. And there were also rewards offered, five pound rewards for any, you know, if you turn in your friend for shooting a homing pigeon, you get five pounds.

Five pounds. Exactly. Yeah. So it was a big deal. Dogs, apparently, too, and pigeons were used heavily in wartime to carry messages, like very reliably. Should we tell the story of Cheremy? How can we not?

I don't see how we could. Yeah. So in World War I... Should we auto-chain it? Because it's Cher? Yeah. In World War I, you mentioned that the Germans were using messenger pigeons with camera strap to their belly for aerial reconnaissance, right?

It's like the bats with the bombs. Kind of, but this is more photography rather than incendiary destruction. But the French were using this for messages, for getting them from the front to behind the lines. Back to HQ. Right. Yeah. And so were the Americans, too.

Apparently, the French used like 30,000 of them in World War I. Americans had something like 600, but one really came through for a New York company at the Battle of the Argonne. It was October 1918 toward the end of the war, and they were trapped by the Germans. So this pigeon named Cher Aimee was released by, I think it was New York company, right? Which was surrounded in a little low lying, I don't even think you can call it a valley. I think the author of this New York Times article that we're getting this from called it like a depression in the ground. And there's a few hundred men who were there.

It started out as 500, and they were starting to get whittled down because they were surrounded by Germans. Even worse than that, the American reinforcements had no idea where this New York company was. They were shelling them, too, because they thought that they were shelling the Germans that were surrounding New York company. They had no idea they were shelling New York company, as well. So apparently, they released a lot of pigeons, and a lot of pigeons got shot. Which means that there were some German sharpshooters there that were really good because it is

tough, like you said, to shoot down a homing pigeon because they are fast. Or they were just shooting a lot of bullets into the air. You know. So they released one of their last ones, Cherami. And Cherami flew and flew and took off and got hit at least once. Had a quarter size hole in his breast, and it shot his leg off. Shot the leg that had the tube with the message saying where this New York company was attached to that leg.

It got shot off, but it also got lodged into the hole in Cherami's chest. Yeah. And the bird flew back to its roost like that. Yeah. Gave the coordinates. I like to think that he chirped them out, even, and said, forget the message. Well, he was saluting with them. Follow me.

Yeah. I believe in love. And 194 men were saved. And Cherami was awarded the Croix de Guerre with palm. Yeah, with palm. I didn't even know. Yeah. I didn't even know.

In no way. That's half the award. Sadly, died in 1919 from the wounds. But man, what a great story. Yeah. Now he's on display. I'm not sure exactly where, but you can find pictures of him stuffed with just one leg. And the other leg with the tube still attached has been preserved as well.

Really? That's probably at the Pigeon Award Museum. Probably. And Providence with Rhode Island. And Chuck, I have to say, I read this one article, too, about, it was called Hawks and Doves, and it was about the irony of using rock pigeons, which are related to doves in some ways, or used to be called doves, as like a wartime symbol. Oh, really?

Because they're very peaceful birds. Interesting. It's on the page for this episode. Well, I think it's time for another little respite. And then we'll come back and talk about the very sad story of the passenger pigeon, right for this. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb?

And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse, and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb, too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Mangesh Atikulur, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends, and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world

came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Josh, we've talked about rock pigeons, which include homing pigeons, carrier pigeons, messenger pigeons. Same thing as a homing pigeon. But there is something called a passenger pigeon, which is not any of those things, and it is not a thing anymore. No, it used to be. Sadly. I mean, it's a thing as far as pest tense goes.

Yes. But there used to be a ton of them. They're a native North American bird. They were about one and a half times the size of a morning dove. They looked a lot like them. And like I said, they were all over. Some say they made up 40% of the North American bird population. 40%.

Yeah, that's a lot. And they like to hang out together. They have the largest documented flock on record in Wisconsin in 1871. They estimated 136 million breeding passenger pigeons over 850 square miles of forest. Yeah. That was Wisconsin. There was supposedly another flock in 1860 that reached 3.7 billion flying over Ontario. They supposedly blacked out the sky.

Yeah, and these are credible witnesses who are writing about these things back in the early 19th century, like John James Audubon, who, number one, knew his birds a little bit, knew what he was talking about, and was a credible scientist. And he wrote about a ride from, I think, Lexington to Louisville in Kentucky in 1813. And he talked about how along the way the sun was blotted out and the sky from horizon to horizon was filled with passenger pigeons. Yeah, he was using that of the opium. And this wasn't like a thing where it just happened and they flew overhead and that was

amazing. This went on for the whole three-day journey from Lexington to Louisville. The whole three days, the sun was blotted out by one single flock of passenger pigeons flying overhead, the same flock. Amazing. You just don't see that these days. Well, no, and you definitely don't see that these days because, like we said, they are completely extinct at this point.

And you sent along a great article called 100 Years After Her Death, Martha the Last Passenger Pigeon, still resonates. And what happened was, a couple of things, one, they were hunted relentlessly for massive amounts of food. Oh, yeah. You could just fly overhead, you could just close your eyes and start shooting up in the air and all tons of passenger pigeons are going to fall around you. Yes.

Like, if you hunt something that big out of existence, then you're doing a lot of hunting. So it was that combined with the deforestation of the East Coast, they think both of those things led to the complete extinction. Yeah, because they fed on mast, which is one of my favorite words of all time. This is the description of hardwood forest nuts, like acorns and chestnuts and hickory nuts and stuff like that. Yeah. Combined, those things are called mast, right?

And I think they fed together as well, right? Yes. Like in groups. Right. So if you start to build roads or you build the world's first subdivision in 1815 or something like that and you cut down a bunch of this forest, you fracture this 850 square mile roost, this nest. Yeah.

And you have a big problem if you're a passenger pigeon. So that combined with over predation by humans led to their extinction. So think about this, Chuck. In the 1870s, there were billions of these things. Billions. In 1914, the last one died. So in like 30, 40 years, they went from billions to extinct. Yeah.

Like that. Yes. And that was Martha, a reference in the article. She was born into captivity, they believe, at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo and then donated later to the Cincinnati Zoo. And they believe in 1900 that there were these three populations where all that was left. Yeah. The last one ever seen in the wild was in 1899.

So they eventually died down and died down. Martha sadly ended up like trembling in a cage because people would throw sand at her to wake her up and like have her move, so they eventually had to, you know, wall that up. And she just bricked her in for her own safety. So sad. So they died out completely. And now she's on display at the Smithsonian until October. Yeah.

October of this year, which is a, which is a what, Chuck? Well, a big lesson to mankind on what can happen if you hunt too much and if you build too many parking lots. Well, you know, there's a, there's a big discussion over the, the passenger pigeon and bring it back. One of my personal heroes, Charles C. Mann is caught in the center of this. Oh, is he? Yes, he is.

Did not know that. So, you know, he wrote one of my favorite books, 1491 and in 1491, he talks about, um, there's, there's a school of thought about the passenger pigeon that, um, they were actually they, their populations exploded just prior to European settlement of North America. Yeah. But after that first Colombian contact. Yeah.

And the idea is that if you go and look around a bunch of like Native American sites, pre-Columbian Native American sites, you don't find that many passenger pigeon boats. There's some there, but there's not a lot and there's certainly not enough to suggest that there were billions of these things at the time. So this idea is that after Colombian contact and disease and violence wiped out and spread through North America and wiped out large, like 90% of the Native Americans living there, the passenger pigeon was no longer preyed upon by the Native Americans. And so their population boomed.

Yeah. So in a way, all these white settlers who hunted this thing into extinction are kind of off the hook because it was their fault anyway that led to this boom in population. Well, what other scholarship says like, no, you're ignoring a bunch of sites. It's probably not the case. White European settlers of North America probably did destroy to extinction a perennially large population of birds in North America. You know what they call that?

What? A cautionary tale. Oh yeah. That sounds familiar. I've heard that before. So there are some naturalists and scientists and biologists now that they think they can bring back the passenger pigeon. But should we?

But should we? And there's a bunch of schools of thought. Some conservationists say, well, if we start bringing back extinct species, maybe we won't protect the ones that are near extinction because people, you know, as I guess robustly, because people say, well, you can bring them back anyway. I don't know about that. Well, I mean, what's the problem though if you think about it? Like what does it matter to the passenger pigeon?

It doesn't know, right? Well, yeah. I mean, there are none. Well, that's the point. Yeah. That a lot of people say- Leave it be. That's one thing.

Yeah. But also if you bring back a passenger pigeon, you are bringing back something whose heritage has been interrupted and therefore all of that collective memory that's passed down from one generation to the next has ended already, right? Yeah. So who's going to teach that passenger pigeon how to be a passenger pigeon? Yeah, it may not know. It may be a monster.

It may kill entire families of people. Well, thank God we have all those tiny pigeon hammers. Yeah. You know? So yeah, there's a lot of schools of thought. Bring it back. It wouldn't know what to do or it might just pick up and be fine. Who knows?

All right. So we've talked about, we've covered passenger pigeons now, the sad extinction of the passenger pigeon, all those other pigeons talked about cameras on the bellies, messages on backpacks and feet. Those are homing messenger pigeons. Yes. I'm going back over everything here. We've covered, I don't even think we mentioned drug traffickers supposedly in Afghanistan

and Pakistan carry 10 grams of heroin each and they've been used. So people have been misusing and using and abusing these birds for millennia. Supposedly the average messenger pigeon can carry up to two and a half ounces of something if it's balanced correctly on its backpack. What? Two and a half ounces. That's a lot. So these things are being treated like royalty if all they have to carry is 10 grams of heroin.

Yeah. That's nothing. Yeah. And when they show up, there's frequently just nine grams, you know what I mean? So this, city pigeons, just your average pigeon that everyone seems to detest. Not everyone. Some people love these things. Yeah.

In France, in Paris, I believe it's illegal to feed them because you've got a Trafalgar Square and other places like that and they can be so vast that you can't even walk. So when you feed them, they congregate. Right. And so that's a problem. They've outlawed it in a lot of parts of the world. Plus they poop everywhere. They're dirty.

They spread disease. It's all very true. Yes. And there have been some cases of legal cases in lawsuits because of pigeons. There was one in France where there was an American woman there feeding like 25 pounds of feed a day in Paris. And it was already, I think, outlawed in Paris. Yeah.

She had been fined 19 times in Nice. So I guess she was like, I'll go to Paris then so I can feed the pigeons. She's like the creepy pigeon feeding lady from Mary Poppins. Remember her? No. Feed the birds. Tup into bag. Tup in.

Tup in. I don't remember. Oh, she was super creepy. I haven't seen that since I was like five. A lot of that movie was creepy. Not as creepy as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Oh, I love that one. Which is like one of the most disturbing children's movies of all time.

The bad guy is one of the scariest bad guys ever. Yeah, he was pretty scary. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, Gone with the Wind was color, not colorized. We goofed that one. What was colorized then that never was color? Well, Ted Turner colorized some things, but that wasn't one of them.

Right. But what was one of them? I don't know. We could go back and look. It just looked phony. That's all I remember. It's probably Citizen Kane. We'll hear about in the email, huh?

Yeah. It wasn't Citizen Kane. So this French, I'm sorry, this American woman feeding all these French pigeons. Right. This other lady is on a park bench. She's ticked off because there's all these pigeons everywhere. She gets up. She tries to kick these things.

She tears her stockings and scratches her limbs up or legs up, apparently, and takes this lady to court and they threw out the case or they lost the case because the judge basically said, you don't know how to kick a pigeon without getting hurt. That's your fault. Certainly not the American lady's fault. What about this other lawsuit? Oh, there is again in France, the French like to sue people for pigeon related stuff. There's a woman who is living in an apartment in a building, a couple floors above a store.

Yeah. Furniture store. They feed pigeons. Apparently the pigeon poop was so bad that the store owner was saying it was driving customers away. Yeah. Like all over the window. Yeah.

Display windows. Or like on the ground and on the door knob or whatever. Sure. Keeping people from coming to a store. So he sued the woman, but the woman's lawyer apparently demonstrated that the store owner couldn't prove that the mess came from the pigeons that this lady was feeding. Could have been any pigeon. Yeah.

That's a dicey one. I guess we could finish here with a couple of instructionals. What to do if you find a homing pigeon. Yeah. I have to say my favorite pigeon now is the homing pigeon. Yeah. I think they're great. They don't, they, they, they, sure, I'll carry a message if you want and then I'll

be a messenger pigeon, but at heart I'm just a homing pigeon. I just want to go home. Yeah. I want to hang out and do my heroin. You know, so here's, here's some advice on what to do if you find a stranded homing pigeon. Number one, give it water. That's the number one thing. Yeah.

And don't force feed it water like I did when I killed that bird. No, no. You don't want to drown it. Put it in a dish. Like a one inch deep dish. Yeah. And don't overwater it like your yard. Right.

You could just bring the pigeon to my yard and let it drink from my flooded lawn. So let it drink on its own in a one inch deep container. Offer it some food. Say you're hungry. Yeah. And you might say, I don't have pigeon food. Yes, you do. If you have rice and pop popcorn, what else?

Buckwheat, barley, canary seed. Yeah. Boom. Any of that stuff. Say you're hungry, you're thirsty. How are you doing? And then again, just put the stuff out for the pigeon to enjoy and choose on his or her own.

That's right. Whether he or she wants to do this. Next thing you do is say, how's the temperature rain for you? You feeling good? Want a scarf? If it's really cold, maybe let's warm it up a little. It's really warm. Let me cool it down.

Yeah. I think they tend to prefer temperate. Slightly. Yeah. On the cooler side of temperate. Yeah. And then they also like to be able to see, but you want to keep them in a place that's safe away from like dogs and cats, but also in like a box or something.

So a box with a screen over it, a dog kennel with the kennel door closed. Um, something like that. Yeah. And with maybe some straw, a blanket, something that it can just hang around in. And again, some seed and some water and what you just do this for like two days, right? Yeah. After a day or two, you say, how are you feeling? Are you rested?

Are you comfortable? Just getting enough food and bevy. Um, it's time for you to go home and then you just, uh, get your tiny little hammer out. Don't make me use this. You, do you just release the homing pigeon and, uh, that little dude or lady, um, should find his or her way home. Yeah.

Like you can bet on it and say, Hey, thanks for the stay. That was great. Well, that's what the pigeon would say to you. Yeah. If that pigeon says that to you, you go catch it again and make some money off of it because most pigeons can't do that. Like Michigan J bullfrog. So, uh, with, um, again, homing pigeons are my favorite.

And if, if you find one and it decides not to leave you, um, you have yourself a homing pigeon as a pet. That's right. Uh, you can also buy them if you're into homing pigeons and raise them yourself. Uh, and when you do, you can train them to do all sorts of neat stuff, but mostly you can train them to race and fly very long distances. And there's a really neat, um, tried and true technique for training homing pigeons. And it's basically all just food based.

Yeah. So they have their nest. They're not training any animal. They have their home base and this is where they stay. They spend most of the time. This is where they eat. And you can take them elsewhere hundreds of miles away if you like, but they, they say you should start off with just like 20 miles, 10 miles, something like that and create like

another roost somewhere at a friend's house or, um, out in a field that you have permission to use. Yeah. You know, make sure you have permission to use the field and you create a roost and you, um, set up food there too, let the pigeon hang out, spend some time there. If you want the pigeon to go back home, probably all you have to do is release it from the second roost and it'll want to go back home. But a surefire way of doing that is to remove its food, right?

In that second, second roost. Sounds mean. And it, well, it'll be like, well, I want some food. I'm going to fly home and it flies home and it gets to eat its food. And you, um, any pigeon roost, any homing pigeon roost has a trap door that the pigeon can get into, but it can't get back out unless you let it out, but they can, so they can come home and get in whenever they want. So they always have food.

But if you want them to go to the second roost point B, you just take their food away at home and they'll say, I know another place to go get food and I'm going to fly to it. Now once you get that down a few times, you can keep moving that roost further and further out. They're going to find it. And if you, uh, say, tell a friend that if they hang out at a second roost, they'll get a special message. You can attach like a little backpack to your homing pigeon and release it and it'll delight

your friend with whatever message you send. This is something I could actually see you doing in like retirement. Well, a lot of people do. Did you see that list of famous people who love pigeons, raised pigeons? No, I didn't, but I know Mike Tyson's one of them. Apparently he's following a big tradition of boxers who raise pigeons. George Foreman, marvelous Marvin Hagler, boxers who raise pigeons. So all these people on this list.

Yeah, Chauchy from Chauchy and Charge, he, uh, he raised pigeons. Charles and Charge, Terry Bradshaw, Elvis Presley, who's, who's that? Hmm. Just kidding. Uh, Charles Darwin, Barney, apparently from, from, it says here he's the big purple dinosaur in Sesame Street. That seems a little confused, but I guess Barney raised pigeons. Lee Marvin, you know what we should do is pick out the least likely person to be a pigeon

fancier. I think he just said it. Who, Lee Marvin, yeah, you might be right actually. You know the, um, the, I would like to see the Birdman of Alcatraz again. That was a great movie. Jimmy Smith. Is that what he's been doing? Yeah, I guess so.

Some of these make sense. Like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. That seems like a totally thing that they would have done together. There was a riveting moment at the end of the pigeons episode where Chuck and Josh just sit there and read quietly. You'll Brenner. On Mike. Tony Curtis.

Lee Marvin's least likely. You think? Yeah. All right. You got anything else? No, I don't think I do. Well, now that you can tell the difference between a homing pigeon, a messenger pigeon, a carrier pigeon, and a passenger pigeon, you should feel pretty good about yourself.

And if you need to brush up on this confusing stuff, you can type the word pigeon into the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring up who knows what. That's right. And since I said who knows what, it's time for a listener mail. All right. This is a, I'm going to call this Kepler Planet follow up. Hey guys, the one aspect of Kepler Planets you did not mention, we can only infer other planets if their orbital plane is aligned with our view of it.

If the star's planet system is off tilt with respect to us, we won't be able to infer its existence yet. Consider the North Star, Polaris. It's kind of perpendicular to these. It's kind of perpendicular to the solar system. Well, not really, but close enough if Polaris Polaris had a planet with intelligent life with Kepler like technology, they could view our sun, but they wouldn't detect any light variations or wobble.

Consider how many planets we found. Now consider how many we can't possibly find giving current technology. It's mind-boggling. Just because of the tilt. I mean, they say that supposedly remember 40 billion Earth like planets in the Milky Way alone. Yeah. That's what we suspect.

So, even more than that, maybe says Jim from the Garden State, and I don't know why I said it like Massachusetts. The Garden State. Uh, New Jersey. I don't know if people are probably talking New Jersey. I live near Powell. So that was your Jersey? No, that wasn't my Jersey.

Let's hear it. Nah. Come on. Nah. Come on. Nah. See, now I'm doing it. Nice.

Thanks, Jim. New Jersey. If you want to point out something we should have mentioned but didn't, we always love being corrected. It's one of our things. We also love hooking ourselves up to car batteries. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathousethuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web at stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.