Found A Lost Racing Pigeon?

by Pigeon Patrol | May 10, 2021 | Bird Law, Columbidae, history of pigeons, MBCA, pet bird

In any pigeon race there will be a number of competitors which lose their way and are unable to find their way back home and these are refered to as strays. There can be a number of reasons for this occuring with the most common being injury, fatigue, and adverse weather conditions. Sometimes strong winds can blow a race bird off its normal flight path and add considerably to the time and distance needed to make the trip home. This can lead to fatigue and with pigeon races in Australia generally being between 100 and 1000 kilometres it is understandable that they sometimes need to stop for a rest. Unfortunately a tired racing pigeon makes easy prey for many animals, those stopping in a backyard can encounter pet cats and dogs while those stopping in rural areas can encounter foxes. Birds of prey are the major cause of injury to racing pigeons, although collisions with unseen power lines can also cause serious injuries.

So what should you do if you find a lost race bird?

1/ Firstly give it a drink of water.

2/ Something to eat. Racing pigeons (unlike feral pigeons) only eat grain. A bird seed mixture of any type available from supermarkets will be quite suitable. Racing Pigeons generally will not eat bread or other scraps.

3/ Check the pigeon for injuries. Often physical injuries will be quite obvious but be sure to check under the wings as these can often hide serious wounds.

4/ Rest. After food, water, and a couple of days rest, a racing pigeon can be released and will in many cases have recovered sufficiently to complete its journey home.

5/ My pigeon keeps coming back, what should I do? Even after rest and food, there can be internal injuries that can prevent a bird from continuing its way home. If this happens check the birds legs. If it is a racing pigeon it will have at least one band or ring on its leg. One of these rings will be hard and plastic coated and will carry information which will allow you to find the birds owner. Quite often the ring will have the name of the town the pigeon has originated from and the phone number of someone in that area for you to contact. Before phoning the contact number on the ring make sure you make a note of the other information on the ring. This other information will include a series of letters, a year, and a number for example VHA 2010 1234. In this case the VHA would stand for Victorian Homing Association, 2010 is the year the pigeon was born, and 1234 is the pigeons identification number.

6/ If your ring does not have a phone number on it then check this list of contacts for someone in your area

http://www.anpa.com.au/found-a-lost-pigeon/

7/ If your pigeon does not have a ring on its leg then it is not a racing pigeon. It may be someones pet or a feral pigeon.

Source

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What is Squab?

by Pigeon Patrol | May 10, 2021 | history of pigeons, pet bird, Pigeon Predators, Pigeons

What Is Squab?

squab are young pigeons that have never flown. For thousands of years, they have been a favorite meal for every stratum of society throughout the world. They were unequivocally the first domesticated poultry, even preceding chicken.

This may surprise twenty-first-century Americans. More often we think of pigeons as annoying denizens of city monuments and buildings. In fact, these are rock doves, a relative of pigeons, and far less edible. Yet squab is considered a most exquisite ingredient in cuisines as distinct as Cantonese, Moroccan, and French. The simple reason for squab’s universal appeal is the delicate, succulent flesh, truly unlike that of any other bird. Squab is a dark-meat bird, like duck and goose, yet the meat is not nearly as fibrous, rendering it far more tender. Its flavor, when properly cooked, is a lush, rich essence, reminiscent of sautéed foie gras, albeit with more texture.

History of Eating Squab

Historically, squab was a reliable and inexpensive source of animal protein. Documents detailing aristocratic banquets frequently show squab used in one or several important courses. B’stilla, a splendid Moroccan phyllo-crusted pie that is sweet, salty, crispy, and juicy at the same time, is traditionally made with squab. It dates from around the 15th century when the Moors were kicked out of Andalusia and migrated to North Africa. Huge molded timbales of pasta, and molded domes of rice made with squab and rich accompaniments, were fashionable 16th and 17th-century Italian culinary showpieces.

Early on, wide circular structures with tapered tops, or dovecotes, were built in fields to attract wild pigeons to roost. Numerous cubbyholes lined the interior, accommodating several breeding pairs. Adult birds forage independently and, being monogamous, return every evening to the same roost throughout their adult life. Other than constructing the residence facility, the squab farmer was required to do little or no maintenance except to harvest the young squab. Using a ladder, one simply plucked them from the nest.

Farming Squab

In the United States, squab are raised primarily in central California and South Carolina. The birds weigh about 1 pound each. Large covered pens are used for up to a dozen breeding pairs. They are capable of producing up to 24 offspring a year. Parents share in all activities required to raise the squab. They build their nest together, incubate the eggs, and feed the young. The male participates willingly as long as the female accommodates him sexually on demand. When she refuses, he pecks her in the middle of the head. As a result, farmers can separate the sexes far more easily than might otherwise be the case.

They just look for the bald birds, which are females.

Sorting young squab from mature pigeons is also an easy activity. The farmer gathers his squab in a crate. When the crate is opened and shaken vigorously, any birds that fly away are not squab but adult pigeons.

No one farms squab to make a fortune. The birds’ notorious sensitivity prevents using modern poultry techniques, like those employed in the factory farming of chickens, to produce enormous flocks at minimal costs. They respond poorly to artificial insemination and inferior-quality feeds laced with animal by-products.

Farm-raised pigeons must have the same food year-round. Their nesting cubbies must never be disturbed. For this reason, the cost of squab, which has remained constant for decades, is expensive relative to mass-marketed chickens. It’s a whole lot of bother to raise good squab. But these succulent birds make a feast fit for a king.

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How to Get Rid of Pigeons

by Pigeon Patrol | May 3, 2021 | Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Netting, Bird Spikes, history of pigeons, Pigeon Control, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Spikes

Need pigeon removal in your hometown?

Pigeons are a determined bird, doggedly living near humans because of the ample food supply. These birds are indiscriminate eliminators of waste, leaving liquid splatters of dropping anywhere they travel. Their lack of concern for cleanliness extends into their everyday activities, and water contamination has been traced back to pigeon carcasses and feces in water towers near roosting sites. The waste from these birds, which are most commonly seen in urban areas, is very corrosive. Concrete, limestone and metal all suffer from the ill-effects of pigeon droppings. In cities, constant cleanup alone costs thousands of dollars.

Because of the homing ability of pigeons, there are difficulties with relocation. This species of bird was once used as a messenger between civilizations, finding their way over hundreds and thousands of miles. The only way to get rid of pigeons is to discourage them and prevent them from frequenting undesired locations. There are a number of ways to accomplish this, some proven to show more success than others. Information about pigeon trapping – analysis and methods for how to trap.

Unsuccessful methods of pigeon control deal mostly with predator fear. Plastic owls are a favorite of the public when, in reality, the fake predator appears as just that—fake. A pigeon will not be any more leery of an unmoving owl than it would an unmoving human. Pigeons are largely unaffected by unpleasant smells, though it has recently been proven that their homing ability is based on scent mapping and not electromagnetic fields. Sounds are another flop when it comes to pigeon control. Ultrasonic sound emitters may very well produce noises humans can’t hear, but rarely are those sounds ‘annoying’ to birds. If a pigeon can put up with all the noise congestion in a busy city, some random sounds from an ultrasonic radio aren’t going to bother it.

The most practical ways to get rid of pigeons is to convince them that they do not or cannot stay near your home or business. Any ledge can be a roosting site. By installing pigeon nets, bird spikes or electric shockers, pigeons will be less inclined to settle on those surfaces. Nets and spikes prevent roosting all together. Electric strips may be difficult to install at higher locations, but many brands offer solar power and require little maintenance. Electric strips do require more attention than netting and are often more expensive. If your building has smaller sections of roof, bird “spiders” are useful instruments. The wire device resembles a sprinkler in design with thin lines of arced metal extending outward from a central location. These wires are loose and are not strong enough to support the weight of a bird.

Information about how to keep pigeons away – prevention techniques.

There is something to be said for determination, too. Even though most scare tactics do not work on pigeons, harassment techniques can prove beneficial if done frequently and without fail. If pigeons have taken over your yard, letting your dog out will chase them away. Yes, they will come back when the dog is gone, but if this scenario is repeated often enough the pigeons will learn that your yard is not the easiest place to visit. When it comes to opportunistic birds, life is all about easy.

Some towns and cities have experimented with employing the use of falcons to control pigeon populations. The benefit to using birds of prey is that they often keep the pigeons moving, preventing any one roosting area to become long-term. Unfortunately, falcons cannot eliminate a large enough number of the nuisance birds to make a noticeable difference without becoming a nuisance bird themselves.

Pigeons are products of their environment. If they were not deliberately fed in parks and on streets a decline in their nuisance behaviors would be seen. These birds can live on naturally occurring food sources. Unfortunately, it is the poor sanitation habits of people that keep these animals desiring our leftovers. If pigeons have overrun your home, be sure that all garbage and compost is carefully disposed of. You may not be able to control the habits of the neighbors on your block, but you can make your house that much more uninviting by following good hygiene habits.

Pigeon Information & Facts

Pigeon Appearance: Pigeons are robust birds with short necks, usually gray in color with a faint iridescence to their feathers. They have a characteristic back and forth rhythm to their head. This bobbing is a mechanism that allows the birds to focus their vision and perceive depth. Pigeons have duplicate black bands on each wing, but the coloration on the main part of the body can vary. Their feet are suited for perching on ledges and high peaks. The beak of the pigeon is medium in both length and width, ideal for pulling apart bread, picking up small food pieces, or fishing spiders out of cracks.

Pigeon Habitat and Behavior: Pigeons are most often seen in cities. This habitat preference is largely due to the surplus of food available and the high roosting opportunities. Pigeons are fond of the water towers on tall buildings, often building messy nests on the rim. For this reason, most cities require water towers be completely sealed to prevent the birds or their waste from contaminating the water supply. A pigeon will nest almost anywhere and will often do so with many others of its kind. A roost can be made atop any vertical surface. Pigeons are known in invade gutters, ducts, air conditioners, attics, warehouses, and drains. They are not overly concerned with sanitary conditions and will utilize any vertical object in any location for their purposes.

Pigeons are also very food-driven. This problem has been made serious by the continued, deliberate feeding of the birds in urban areas. The birds have little fear of humans and will often converge around people in parks and near restaurants. Pigeon feeding is a common hobby of many city-goers, yet another reason for the lack of caution around humans.

Egg laying can take place as often as every other month. Courtship between the male and the female is brief, and the resulting egg clutch usually only contains two eggs. An abundance of pigeons will result in quick overpopulation, regardless of how many eggs are laid per pair. Some cites have sought population control by replacing viable eggs with fake or unfertilized eggs. This tactic may be effective short-term, but pigeons will lay another clutch once the original appears unproductive.

Pigeon Diet: Pigeons will scavenge for almost any type of grain-based food source. The habit of city restaurants discarding stale bread into parks increases the role this type of food plays in the pigeon diet. In nature, the birds eat insects, berries, seeds, grains, and spiders.

Pigeon Nuisance Concerns: Pigeons are not as bold as some species of birds adapted to living off human leftovers. The major concern when it comes to this species centers on its roosting habits. Pigeons most often roost in number. They are not a sanitary bird, often eliminating waste in their own nests, and living on top of the bodies of their own kind. Pigeon waste is caustic and will do permanent damage to stone and concrete. In many cities, water contamination due to pigeons and their droppings has been a major concern. Because these birds pool around areas with a high opportunity for food (such as restaurants), there is a logical concern for public health.

Pigeon Diseases: The most common zoonotic disease associated with pigeons is called histoplasmosis. This disease is caused by a fungal infection facilitated by the dried powder of pigeon feces. People with compromised immune systems should also be wary of cryptococcosis, another fungal infection affecting only those without healthy defenses. Psittacosis, more commonly transmitted by exotic birds, has been reported in larger cities. These illnesses present with flu-like symptoms, making diagnosis and treatment difficult unless the disease is well underway.

This site is intended to provide pigeon education and information, so that you can make an informed decision if you need to deal with a pigeon problem. This site provides many pigeon control articles and strategies, if you wish to attempt to solve the problem yourself. If you are unable to do so, which is likely with many cases of pigeon removal, please go to the home page and click the USA map, where I have wildlife removal experts listed in over 500 cites and towns, who can properly help you with your nuisance pigeon.

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Pigeon waste, cosmic melodies and noise in scientific communication

by Pigeon Patrol | May 3, 2021 | history of pigeons, Pigeon Control, Pigeon Droppings, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeons

There it was, that darned noise again.

Nobody could possibly be happy cleaning pigeon droppings. Yet Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were being forced to do it. As good scientists they simply could not avoid it, since they had to discount the role of this “white dielectric substance” in the noise that was plaguing their equipment. When they finished with the cleaning and dispatched the pigeons by mail to a faraway place, the noise still did not disappear. And it seemed to come from all directions. The implications of this annoying constant background hum, corresponding to a temperature of only 3 degrees above absolute zero, signified one of the most momentous discoveries in twentieth-century physics, notable even among Nobel Prize-winning discoveries.

Arno Penzias, the German-born physicist who fled from the Nazis with his family in 1939, is at Lindau this year along with his co-recipient Robert Wilson. There are two other physics Nobel laureates this year at Lindau- George Smoot and John Mather. The four men whose work is separated by forty years share a very close connection. Smoot and Mather’s work put the capstone on that of Penzias and Wilson’s. In a way the work of these gentlemen eclipses the work of all Nobel laureates since it deals with something that happened long before any of the others made their discoveries. In fact, it was so long before that it dealt with the beginning of time itself…or so we think. Penzias and Wilson discovered what is called the”cosmic microwave background radiation”, which is nothing less than the notes from the harp that the universe played when it fired up. Just like you can guess the identity of the great conductor Herbert von Karajan from listening to the thundering notes of his performance of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, so can you discern the violent birth throes of the universe from the noise this cosmic cataclysm left behind.

It was noise, quite literally. And it was bothering Penzias and Wilson when they were working on a radio antenna inthe fall of 1964 in a small town called Holmdel in New Jersey. There, Bell Laboratories which owned the instrument had turned it over to Penzias and Wilson for pure science. That was a different age, when companies like BellLabs gave free rein to researchers to pursue their own ideas; in the ensuing decades the institution would produce a steady stream of Nobel laureates,an astonishing feat for an industrial laboratory. But at that point the lab was just getting warmed up.

The antenna was about twenty feet wide and shaped like a horn to minimize reception from the sides. It was originally designed to detect transmitted signals from Echo, the first communications satellite. But now Penzias and Wilson were using it to detect radio waves from celestial bodies. The receiver was tuned to detect only frequencies in the microwave region of the spectrum.

But there it was, that darned noise again. No matter what they did to the antenna, it was steadily humming in the background, like one of those overenthusiastic teenagers deliberately trying to annoy you. Like good scientists, Penzias and Wilson started to eliminate all possible sources of noise they could find. Radio noise could arise from any number of sources. It could come from the ground which was warmed up by the sun. It could arise from the earth’s atmosphere, or from the gas between the stars, or from the emission of molecules in outer space. Noise could be generated by waves bouncing off some of the sharp edges in their antenna. Oneby one the scientists investigated and discounted all these sources. They covered up the sharp edges with aluminum tape. They turned the antenna towards and away from major cities like New York. And of course, finally in desperation, they cleaned up waste from a family of pigeons that was roosting in a small part of the antenna horn. They dispatched these pigeons to the main offices of Bell Labs (like good homing pigeons the birds promptly showed up two days later). The noise still would not disappear. Like constant mumbling from disgruntled voters at a campaign speech, it simply would not die.

The two men were accomplished scientists and they did not doubt their own skills. Penzias had worked with Isidor Rabi (whom we met earlier) and Charles Townes, the inventor of the maser, at Columbia University. Wilson had gotten his PhD. at Caltech a few years ago. Their temperaments also complemented each other. Penzias was a big picture man, trying to tie together facts in an overarching thread. Wilson was much more detail-oriented and could patiently tinker with equipment until he got it right. Together the scientists were confident in their analysis and believed they had discarded all sources of noise. Yet it remained. For the moment they decided to take a break.

It was December of that year, and Penzias was coming back on an airplane from a conference. The “noise problem” was on his mind and he mentioned it to a fellow astronomer named Bernie Burke. A short time later, Burke called Penzias back with some interesting news. He had just seen a manuscript written by a physicist named Jim Peebles at Princeton University along with his supervisor Robert Dicke. The manuscript predicted that because of the intense heat during the birth of the universe, there should exist today a remnant of the Big Bang, which would manifest itself uniformly as steady background radiation. Because of the time elapsed since the Big Bang, the temperature of this radiation should be no more than afew degrees kelvin above absolute zero.

Oh yes, and it should be detectable as constant hiss in a good radio telescope.

I leave it to the students at this year’s Lindau meeting to personally ask Penzias what he must have felt when he heard about the Peebles-Dicke paper from Burke. But it surely must have sent his heart racing. Intrigued, Penzias called Dicke. Dicke’s heart must have raced even more because just then he had been trying to construct his own antenna to detect the cosmic noise that his paper predicted. Dicke promptly got into his car and drove the thirty miles or so from Princeton to check out Penzias and Wilson’s data. When he confirmed its authenticity, he must have felt an intense mix of excitement, amazement and chagrin. He had narrowly missed making the discovery that won Penzias and Wilson the Nobel Prize for physics in 1978.

Penzias and Wilson in front of the Holmdel radio antenna

Sounds from a faraway time

The evolution of the idea of the cosmic microwave background is almost a textbook study of ignorance and triumph, and how experimentalists and theoreticians can sometimes unintentionally delay progress by failing to communicate with one another. The Big Bang theory was proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, although interestingly the term ‘Big Bang’ was pejoratively coined by a detractor of the theory, Fred Hoyle. Later the theory was developed by the brilliant and colorful Russian physicist, scotch lover and popular science writer George Gamow and his colleagues, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman. After World War 2, Gamow’s colleagues Alpher and Herman predicted the cosmic microwave background. This was based on their ideas about nucleosynthesis- the formation of elements in the universe.

Robert Herman (left) and Ralph Alpher. In the middle is George Gamow, materializing out of a bottle of ‘Ylem’, the primordial soup from which our universe originated.

Big Bang Theory cosmology is based on Einstein’s theory of gravitation. In 1929 Edwin Hubble had already made the groundbreaking discovery that the universe seemed to be expanding. This meant that at some point back in time it must have been infinitely compressed. Compression means high temperature, in this case, a very high temperature of 10 billion degrees when the universe was only one second old. At this temperature matter as we know it ceases to exist, and the universe consists of a thick boiling broth of subatomic particles and electromagnetic radiation in the form of very high frequency gamma rays. Electromagnetic radiation is emitted and absorbed by all electrically charged particles. When there are a sufficient number of particles, this radiation manifests itself as black-body radiation. Black-body radiation can be defined by a certain value of energy at a given frequency range and thus can be completely fixed by the temperature. At ten billion degrees, there would be massive creation of electrons and positrons from the energy of other moving particles. But after one second, Big Bang theory physics predicts that if the number of photons is larger than the number of matter particles, then the initial black-body radiation will continue to be black-body radiation. The only change in this radiation is that it cools with the expansion of the universe. About 400,000 years after the beginning, an epochal event happened. Stable atoms of hydrogen began to form, and the radiation was ‘decoupled’ from the matter and was left free to wander on its own. Thus, even today, almost fifteen billion years later, space should be filled with black-body radiation left over from the Big Bang. Its temperature should be roughly 3 K.

This at least was what Alpher and Gamow conjectured. But they were not the first ones to think about it. In fact the microwave background had been indirectly observed in the late 1930s and early 40s by American astronomers. These astronomers saw faint signs of light absorption by certain molecules in outer space and concluded that the molecules were somehow being ‘pumped up’ with energy that came from a temperature of 2.3 K. Unfortunately, there was yet no theoretical framework in which this observation could fit, and it became part of the countless number of other details in astronomy. Now, when Gamow, Alpher and Herman formed their ideas, they did not know about this experimental work. Most incredibly, a couple of years later, two Russian physicists published a paper saying that not only should this background exist, but that the best detecting instrument for it would be the radio antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey! As if to cap this circus of ignorance and lack of communication, Penzias, Wilson and Dicke had all not heard of these earlier predictions; somehow unlike the cosmic background, the signal had been lost in the noise. One can only wonder how things would be if this drama were to be enacted today, in the era of the Internet and Email.

Dicke in fact thought he was the first one proposing the cosmic microwave background. His reasoning was fascinating and harkened back to analogies in Hindu and Buddhist philosophies about the creation of the universe. Dicke was a proponent of the ‘oscillating universe’ which posits that the universe has no end or beginning but cycles through time. According to his logic, if the heavy elements had been created through nucleosynthesis, they could not keep on increasing in proportion indefinitely; after all, the observed universe is largely contained of hydrogen and helium and not heavy elements. Thus, at some point the heavy elements would have to be annihilated to make room for the next batch of matter. This annihilation would produce radiation, and it’s this radiation that would manifest itself as the cosmic background. Dicke’s oscillating universe tome is a perfect example of a scientific ‘model’, a conceptual construction that retains some simple aspects of the universe but which can neatly explain a key observation. As with models, Dicke’s prediction of the microwave background does not uniquely depend on the oscillating universe model. In fact it arises perfectly from the modern day theory of the Big Bang.

Dicke was supremely competent for this kind of theorizing. Today he is the underappreciated man in the cosmic microwave background story. Dicke was a genius at electronic devices, working on important radar components at the famous Radiation Laboratory at MIT during the war. In the early 60s, he did a highly accurate measurement proving the equivalence of inertial mass and gravitational mass, a foundational concept of Einstein’s relativity. Dicke’s thirst was not slaked just by doing experiments. He also provided the first quantum theory of the laser. By the mid 60s Dicke was a legend, the Enrico Fermi of his time, highly accomplished in both theory and experiment. As it turned out though, even Dicke could not escape the vagaries of space and time. Robert Henry Dicke died in 1997.

Robert Henry Dicke (1916-1997)

In 1989, a satellite called COBE was launched by NASA that would measure Penzias and Wilson’s microwave background to unprecedented accuracy. Two of the principal scientists in this endeavor were George Smoot and John Mather who are at Lindau this year. The satellite’s measurements of the black body radiation curve were so remarkably accurate that the error bars in the curve which typically extend on top and bottom were almost lost in the signal.

The COBE satellite black-body radiation curve with the data points (red) plotted on the theoretical spectrum (black). The two match up almost perfectly

The COBE satellite followed by the Wilkinson Probe satellite launched in 2001 put the icing on the microwave background cake. The Big Bang theory has attained the status of one of our most highly refined and validated theories, thanks to the work of Smoot, Penzias, Wilson, Mather and many others. It seems only wonderfully fitting that Penzias, Wilson, Smoot and Mather are all attending this year’s meeting, coming full circle and neatly tying together the ends of a story spread over 40 years, which in turn tells the story of moments in time billions of years ago.

George Smoot and John Mather (Physics, 2006)

The story of the microwave background is an exercise in scientific history, demonstrating how ideas can, and sometimes do not, build on top of each other. It would have been interesting to see how the same story would have played out in today’s age, when the barriers to communication have been all but shattered by the availability of hundreds of years of research that can be accessed through the click of a mouse. Scientific ideas are hostage to the same qualities of human fallibility, determination, creativity, and of course, the uncertainties of space and time, as are other aspects of the human experiment. All we can do is persevere.

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Gambling: Does It Turn People into Pigeons?

by Pigeon Patrol | May 3, 2021 | Bird Law, Bird Spikes, history of pigeons, Pigeons, Pigeons in the News

I admit that topic is a bit off my usual

Brain Sense

beat, but occasionally a piece of research comes along that is just too intriguing to pass by. Such is the case with a new report out of the University of Kentucky, published this week in the

Proceedings of the Royal Society

(UK). The study’s lead author, psychology professor Thomas Zentall, studied some pigeon gamblers and came up with some intriguing insights into human gamblers.

Zentall and collaborator Jessica Stagner set pigeons up in cages and let the birds peck at lights to obtain rewards of food pellets. If the pigeons pecked on the left, they received a green or a red light; after 10 seconds, the red light yielded 10 pellets but the green light yielded nothing. Because the odds were stacked at 20 percent–which is much more generous than your average casino–the pigeons averaged 2 pellets per peck if they pecked on the left.

If they pecked to the right, however, they saw yellow or blue lights, which both yielded 3 pellets of food per trial. Same every time. Sure thing.

So which would you choose: a guaranteed 3 or the remote possibility of a 10 (with the odds stacked against you)? Seems most pigeons behave like human gamblers. They don’t go for the sure thing. Most of Zentall’s experimental birds consistently chose the left side, apparently motivated by some bird-brained hope that they would receive the 10 pellets, even though 0 was a 4:1 favorite. “It’s more efficient not to gamble, and the likelihood of winning is low, but pigeons do it anyway,” Zentall says. “And so do people.”

“There’s a basic behavioral, biological process involved that probably affects many different species, and it doesn’t require the excitement of a casino, the misunderstanding of the likelihood of winning, social reinforcement or the publicity of winners,” Zentall says. “These factors may help, but that’s not it. Look at the pigeons.”

Zentall is also looking at the pigeons to try to find out why some pigeons, like some people, eschew gambling. (Yes, a few, wise pigeons peck to the right.) “Most of the time, people who aren’t terribly happy with what they’re doing choose to gamble because it’s exciting to them and other things generally aren’t,” says Zentall, and pigeons may be no different. Zentall thinks boredom may be an important motivator for gambling. His pigeons are less likely to gamble after spending time in a room playing with toys and other pigeons.

“We can understand the basis for gambling,” Zentall says, “but why has this evolved in people and in animals?” The answer may lie in the animal’s sense of control. “In nature, probability isn’t constant,” he said. “Animals are attracted to stimuli that make it easy to predict the availability of food and approaching these stimuli often makes their occurrence more likely. In lab conditions, this isn’t the case. . . . In addition, humans remember the wins and not the losses, which has functional value in nature. . . . Animals too, don’t remember where they didn’t find food, but do remember where they did.”

Thus, gambling may have survival value in nature, but not in the casino.

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The pigeon that saved a World War II bomber crew

by Pigeon Patrol | Apr 18, 2021 | history of pigeons, Pigeons

Seventy years ago a carrier pigeon performed the act of “heroism” that saw it awarded the animal’s equivalent of the Victoria Cross – the Dickin Medal. It was the first of of dozens of animals honoured by veterinary charity PDSA during World War II.

On 23 February 1942, a badly damaged RAF bomber ditched into the North Sea.

The crew were returning from a mission over Norway, but their Beaufort Bomber had been hit by enemy fire and crashed into the sea more than 100 miles from home.

Struggling in freezing waters – unable to radio an accurate position back to base – the four men faced a cold and lonely death.

But as the aircraft went down, the crew had managed to salvage their secret weapon – a carrier pigeon. The blue chequered hen bird, called Winkie, was set free in the hope it could fly home to its loft in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, and so alert air base colleagues to their predicament.

During World War II, carrier pigeons were routinely carried by RAF bombers for this very eventuality, though in an era before GPS and satellite locator beacons, rescue was far from certain.

But Winkie did make it home, after flying 120 miles, and was discovered, exhausted and covered in oil by owner George Ross who immediately informed RAF Leuchars in Fife.

The pigeon was not carrying a message, but the RAF were able to calculate the position of the downed aircraft using the time difference between the plane’s ditching and the arrival of the bird – taking into account the wind direction and even the impact of the oil on Winkie’s feathers to her flight speed.

A rescue mission was launched and the men were found within 15 minutes.

Elaine Pendlebury, from the PDSA, said the carrier pigeon had been released as a “last ditch stand” when the crew realised they had no other options.

“I find it very, very moving really. These people would have died without this pigeon message coming through,” said Ms Pendlebury.

Winkie became the toast of the air base, with a dinner held in her honour. A year later, she became the first animal to receive the Dickin Medal – named after PDSA’s founder Maria Dickin – for “delivering a message under exceptional difficulties”.

More than 60 animals have since received the award, including 18 dogs, three horses and one cat. But pigeons still rule the medal roost, with 32 being given medals, all between 1943 and 1949.

Top secret messages

“It’s very hard for us with mobile phones and emails and things like that to think about the way communication would have happened in the 1940s in wartime,” Ms Pendlebury told BBC Scotland.

“It was very difficult and the pigeons certainly saved numerous lives by flying through really dreadful situations.”

One pigeon, called GI Joe, was an American bird which saved more than 1,000 lives when it got a message through that a village about to be bombed had actually been recaptured by British forces. Another – Mary of Exeter – was used to send top secret messages and received 22 stitches after being injured in the course of her duties.

“I’ve been a veterinary surgeon for quite some time but I find the ones that have won the PDSA Dickin medal, the stories are quite inspiring – above and beyond really,” Ms Pendlebury added.

“The message that’s on the medal is ‘We Also Serve’, which sums it up really.”

Source

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