SPEAKER_01 0:42

It's October 1918. We're stationed in the Argonne Forest in France, and more than 500 men are trapped behind enemy lines. They're being hit by fire from their own artillery.

SPEAKER_02 0:54

They're fighting themselves?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Precisely. But they have no idea. And the worst part, they're cut off. No radios, no wires, no chance at communication. What do they do then? They can't even talk to each other. Exactly. So the commander, Charles Whittlesley, is desperate. But he realizes he has one last option. Despite the slim chances at success, he decides to send out one last messenger. The commander gives a soldier a note and ties it to his body. With that, the brave soldier takes flight into a storm of bullets and shrapnel. A shot hits his breast, he loses an eye, and his leg is hanging by a single tendon. But the lone trooper doesn't stop. He carries on for 25 miles to deliver the message. Did he make it? The message was simple. For heaven's sake, stop it! The shelling ceases. 194 lives are saved. The messenger was named Sherami. Because of his effort, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre, a military medal of honor. Sherami was a true war hero. Oh, and one more thing. Sherami wasn't a soldier. Sheremy was a pigeon. And hello everybody. Welcome to When Rats Fly, the unprecedented fall of pigeons. I'm Farron. I'm Joey.

SPEAKER_03 2:13

And I'm Sunjina. Today we're ultimately asking the question: why did we abandon the pigeon?

SPEAKER_02 2:20

Featuring special guest and pigeon expert, Dr. Aaron Blazedle. So, what is the history of pigeons? Before we started calling them pests, pigeons were actually our closest companions. And I'm not talking about dating back hundreds of years. We're talking thousands of years.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

Wow, thousands of years? Really long time. Exactly. In fact, they were one of the first domesticated birds. Ancient Mesopotamians were raising them for food and ritual.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

I love that you mention rituals, because that leads me to one of my favorite facts about pigeons. Many species of mammals that we're familiar with are socially polygamous. However, with birds and pigeons specifically, they're actually monogamous, like us. Well, actually, it's whatever floats your boat, but I'd say most of us. Haha. Once they choose a mate, that's it.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

Isn't that the cutest? That's really cute. And you're exactly right. Because of their monogamous habits, ancient Mesopotamian civilizations chose pigeons to use in rituals and shrines to celebrate love. The reproductive magic of pigeons also made them the faces of fertility and sex in Mesopotamian mythology. This was forever ago. Wanna guess how long ago?

unknown 3:31

Hmm.

SPEAKER_03 3:32

Thousand years?

SPEAKER_02 3:34

Surely it can't be much more than a thousand years, right?

SPEAKER_03 3:38

Actually, this was from as long as 6,500 years ago. That's a really long time back.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Oh wait. I guess that's why so many people like to release doves at wedding ceremonies or funerals.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

You're so right. But I also think it's crazy how we don't really care about these birds anymore, because weren't we the ones who brought them here? I mean, pigeons aren't even native to North America.

SPEAKER_03 4:00

They're not. Pigeons are actually native to Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. It was the European colonists who brought them over in the 1600s as a food source.

SPEAKER_02 4:12

Alright. So they were a food source and they were symbols for love and fertility. What else were pigeons known for?

SPEAKER_01 4:19

You might be surprised, but for centuries they were a status symbol, a sign of prestige and wealth. Believe it or not, pigeons meant luxury.

SPEAKER_02 4:27

That's kind of hard to believe, isn't it? So many people hate pigeons nowadays. They're dirty, they poop on your car, and they're just annoyingly everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 4:37

The change is so drastic. I almost feel bad for these poor pigeons.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

It's really sad how we switched up on them. We've become so apathetic towards them, but before they were extremely important, especially for the military. Oh, that's like the Cher Me story you told us at the start. Yes, exactly. Remember how I said Sherami was used to deliver messages? Well, the US military had a whole organization that took advantage of that. It was called the U.S. Army Pigeon Service.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

That sounds so cool. You mean they were an official department of the Army? Who would have imagined some small birds like pigeons would be in the military?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

During the World Wars, the U.S. Army Pigeon Service had roughly 54,000 pigeons. They had a 90% success rate in delivering messages. We literally relied on their biological GPS to win wars. The story I told you about, Sherami? One pigeon changed the trajectory of the lost battalion.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Oh my goodness. 54,000 birds. That sounds like a lot of work. I mean, we already had the telegram and radios, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:38

We did, but you have to remember that this technology isn't always reliable in the middle of a battle. Pigeons were used because they were often the only way to communicate when radio equipment was broken or when wires were cut by enemy fire.

SPEAKER_03 5:51

Yeah, they were surprisingly stealthy. So pigeons were incredibly difficult to intercept, especially compared to a radio signal that could be easily jammed, or a running soldier who could be seen by enemies. They can fly through heavy fire in extreme weather at speeds over 60 miles per hour. I bet that's how Shirami was able to survive and save the day.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

That's awesome. I also remember reading that they even used them on ships.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

They did. The Navy actually established pigeon lofts at coastal air stations. In 1919, the Naval Air Station in Akasha became the main base for Navy pigeon training. It was the largest pigeon school in the country, with over 300 birds. They were well cared for, bright light, lots of running water, electricity, and even a hospital ready to provide medical care if they fell ill. And guess what? They were always armed guards stationed and patrolling the grounds at night. You could say they were almost treated like royalty.

SPEAKER_03 6:45

As they should be. I mean, during World War I, the Navy had over 1,500 pigeons in service. And they were considered so vital that every single patrol aircraft was required to carry two pigeons on board just in case of emergency.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Right. If a plane went down at sea, the pilot would release the pigeon with their coordinates. It was basically the 1940s version of an emergency beacon. One of the biggest benefits was their homing instinct. The Navy found that pigeons could be trained to return to their lofts even from moving ships or varying locations at sea. They were the most reliable backup system the military had.

SPEAKER_02 7:19

Wow. They weren't just messengers, they were literal lifesavers. Pigeons made the difference between life and death. They better have been celebrated the same way soldiers were. They deserve their flowers. Along with Veterans Day, maybe we should have a Pigeons Day too. Who do we need to talk to to make that happen?

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Then you'll be happy to know that they were celebrated. Many stories of individual pigeons became famous back at home, and their surviving pigeons were cheered for next Veterans and Victory Parades.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

Aww.

SPEAKER_03 8:00

Did he make it? Don't worry, he managed to save them before anything bad happened.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

And that's a great story, Sanja. It just goes to show that they weren't simply celebrated, even sometimes adored. They were often especially well taken care of, with pigeon handlers having strict guidelines on the conditions of their living spaces, the amount of sunlight they received, the food they fed, and detailed instructions on how to remove other pests from pigeon spaces to ensure that they stay as healthy as possible. Pigeons were really loved.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Now, let's talk about that built-in GPS. Sanjana, how do they actually do it? How does a bird find its way home from a thousand miles away in a place it's never been?

SPEAKER_03 8:41

I'm glad you asked, because it's actually mind-blowing. Scientists call it homing, and it's not just one thing. It's a multisensory toolkit. Multisensory toolkit? Yeah. Well, first they use magnetoreception. The tiny particles of magnetite in their beaks, along with specialized proteins in their eyes, allow them to literally see the Earth's magnetic field. That's where the built-in compass comes from. The signals from this compass are then sent to the ophthalmic branch of the olfactory nerve to the brain. You lost me. Ophthalmic what now? Sorry, I'm getting carried away. Essentially the signals they pick up from their environment are sent from their beaks, eyes, and nose to the brain.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Oh, I get it now. But don't they use sound as well?

SPEAKER_03 9:28

Yeah, they can actually hear infrasound, which is ultra-low frequency waves that travel hundreds of miles. They can hear the sound of the ocean or windover mountain ranges. They're basically navigating by a soundscape we can't even perceive.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Incredible. I've got to be honest, I've always been confused about the navigating system of pigeons.

SPEAKER_02 9:47

You're not alone. Even modern-day experts tend to disagree on what exactly is the pigeon's main method of navigation. Here's what pigeon expert and enthusiast Dr. Aaron Blazedle has to say about it.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Yeah, so I'm Professor Aaron Blazedle, and I'm a professor in psychology at UCLA in the area of behavioral neuroscience, and I study animal cognition. So I compare cognition, learning, memory, other kind of things in humans and pigeons and rats and other species along the way. But right now it's humans, pigeons, rats, is what my lab focuses on.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

So we know that pigeons were used in World War I for their homing capabilities. Can you tell us more about the science behind how that works?

SPEAKER_00 10:32

It's still an evolving process. It's really hard to get a good scientific insight into homing because it's long distances. And until recently, we haven't been able to track the pigeons over their entire flight from a release site back home. Now people have wearable technologies they can put on the pigeons that can geotrack them, or even have cameras on the body of the pigeon so you can actually see from the pigeon's perspective what are they looking at while they're flying. And so we're starting to actually get insight into that question, but people have been curious about it for a long time. And it looks like there are a number of different parts to the story of how a pigeon, a homing pigeon, flies from 100 kilometers away back home. One is they seem to form a polarized map. They know wherever you take them in space, like if you take them from their home colony and drive some 60 to 100 kilometers away, they're somehow keeping track of the direction and distance back home. And they use polarizing cues like a polarized light, which even on a cloudy day they could see polarized light, or of celestial cues like the sun. And some pigeons seem to show evidence of using olfactory cues, like the long senses of smell or odor gradients. Like there's a flower field over there near their home loft, and even from a hundred kilometers away, they can smell sort of end trails of that gradient, and they can follow that gradient. So odor cues and anything that over a large scale can orient them in the correct direction is the first part of the story. They fly for a while until they start seeing visual cues near their home, and then they transition to using those local cues like landmarks to navigate.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

So you see, with an incredible memory for landmarks combined with their ability to see the Earth's magnetic field and polarized light, along with a sense of smell that maps out local odor gradients, you have the most sophisticated navigator on the planet.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

That explains why pigeons have been used for centuries to send messages.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

Precisely, Farin, and it doesn't stop there. Hippocampal formation is also essential to pigeons' navigational abilities, which makes sense since the hippocampus is essential for long and short-term memory storing and spatial navigation.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

Studies have even shown that pigeons exhibit similar psychological aspects to humans, such as exhibiting the sunk cost effect, where something is continued when effort is put into it.

SPEAKER_02 13:00

Some other studies also determine that they are also able to differentiate when two stimuli are different and match stimuli that are the same. This only further shows the high level of intelligence of pigeons.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

So I'll bet by this point you're thinking, hey, maybe these pigeons are pretty cool. Maybe I completely underestimated them. That's exactly what I was thinking. Well, you don't even know the half of it. Please tell us more. Have you ever heard of the World War II scientist, B.F. Skinner?

SPEAKER_03 13:29

I think so. Are you talking about the guy who coined the term operant conditioning, which essentially rewards good behavior and therefore minimizes bad behavior or unfavorable behavior?

SPEAKER_01 13:41

Exactly. What many people don't know is that B.F. Skinner's research in operant conditioning was actually done on pigeons.

SPEAKER_03 13:48

You're kidding.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Not when bit. In fact, pigeons were so good at completing tasks when being rewarded that they were even trained to direct missiles. Now I'm with Sanjana. You've gotta be messing with us. How would they even be able to do something like that? I'm glad you asked. Pigeons were rewarded with food each time they pecked a moving spot on a screen. Skinner increased the amount of time in between rewarding the pigeons, eventually getting them to peck the moving dot on the screen about 10,000 times for 45 minutes without reward. He then placed the pigeons in the nose cockpit of a guiding missile, and they were able to direct the aircraft whenever it steered off course by continuously pecking the targets on a live video feed of the ground below. And you're telling me they never got distracted? Precisely. In fact, when compared with regular human test subjects, pigeons were 93% accurate at keeping course, while humans were only 38%. Wow. They must have trained tons of pigeons for the project. Not quite. Actually, the project never took flight. Why not? Well, the project was paused and resumed a number of times, but as a direct quote from Skinner states, our problem was no one would take us seriously.

SPEAKER_03 15:00

Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

That's disappointing.

SPEAKER_02 15:02

But I'm guessing that once technology progressed enough, there was no point to continue using pigeons.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Exactly. But don't worry, Skinner's research in operant conditioning proved to be useful in other areas outside of the military.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

Oh, I remember this. His research completely changed how schools were oriented, focusing on rewarding good behavior and mildly penalizing the bad behavior to give students an incentive to do well.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

You're exactly right, Sanjana. Here's a cookie for your outstanding contributions so far. Awesome. Hey, where's my cookie? Maybe next time. While Skinner's research might not have been continued after World War II due to technological advancements such as the telegraph and telephone that reduced the need for homing pigeons, Dr. Blazedell has continued similar research relating to operant conditioning on pigeons.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Why did I get into pigeons? Yeah. Good question. I had an opportunity between my junior and senior year to work in a primate lab where they actually had many different species of primates. So they had uh two chimpanzees, one baboon, they had uh spider monkeys. I mean, just a plethora of these primates. I got to work with the trainer as like an assistant to the trainer, working with them on behavioral studies. And it was working with those animals I realized they're so interesting. They've got minds of their own and they're behaving and they're doing things, but they're not quite like humans. It was my first kind of experience with other animals, aside from pets I've had as a kid, where I got to see that there's something human-like about them and yet also separate from humans. And so I wanted to shift and go to study cognition and the mind of the animal. And so that brought me to a rat lab for my PhD. The work I was doing with rats on learning and memory processes as a PhD student led me to a postdoc in a pigeon lab because I could use the pigeon to ask certain kinds of questions that I couldn't ask with the rat that were more close to thinking about things that humans do, like spatial navigation. And so I set up my lab when I got a job offer here at UCLA, came here in 2001. I set up to have rats because I'm familiar with them, but also pigeons, because I can ask questions about like spatial cognition. Like if they're learning spatial locations on a 2D surface of a touch screen, I can then give them very precise types of learning experiences about navigating, and then give them specific tests that where how they perform on the test tells me something about what they learned and how they go beyond all of the specific learning examples. They generalize and derive new spatial relations. So that was kind of what got me hooked with working with pigeons was the power of the procedures of using touch screens and visual displays and rewarding them like Skinner did with food reinforcement for pecking behavior on the screen to then unlock the animal mind, the pigeon mind, and get it access to the kinds of cognitive processes that are going on. So that's what led me to using pigeons.

SPEAKER_03 18:05

Wow, thank you, Dr. Blaze Dove. Your research on operant conditioning in pigeons has really illustrated their intelligence and importance.

SPEAKER_02 18:14

Okay, so we have this ancient high-tech war hero. But today, if a pigeon lands near your lunch in the park, you're more likely to scream, rat with wings, than give it a medal.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

But that's a pretty recent phenomenon. Even like one of the faculty members that retired a few years after I got here, he arrived here as a professor in the 50s. He was from Brooklyn. He and his brother in Brooklyn used to have pigeons on the roof of their building. And he said lots of people had pigeons on the roofs of their buildings, and they would send their pigeons out, and one thing the kids would do is send a female out so it would attract males from another person's pigeon coop and capture them. It was like kind of a little game around the world. Even today, people talk about, oh yeah, my dad used to keep pigeons, or my uncle keeps pigeons, or my whomever, like on their building. So it's even still a lot of people fancy pigeons.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Yeah, you have a few pigeon fans still. So what happened? When did the narrative flip?

SPEAKER_03 19:09

A lot of it comes down to control. As we built more sanitized cities in the mid-20th century, we decided that nature belonged out there, not in our windowsills.

SPEAKER_02 19:19

Right. In the 1960s, New York City Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving famously coined the term rats with wings. But it wasn't based on science. Pigeons actually carry fewer diseases than the average stray cat. It was actually about aesthetics.

SPEAKER_03 19:34

Yeah, that's a common misconception related to pigeons, and might have heavily contributed to the negative perception pigeons often receive. They actually only really pose the risk of transmitting diseases such as cryptococcosis, hyptoplasmosis, and psychicosis through their droppings. And this is only a threat to individuals with heavily compromised immune systems. I've never even heard of those diseases. That's because they usually manifest as flu-like symptoms, such as pneumonia. In really extreme cases, they can cause meningitis.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Ah, that makes sense. Well, once we labeled them as pests, we started treating them with extreme violence. I mean, we're talking pigeon shoots, where thousands are released from crates just to be used as target practice.

SPEAKER_03 20:21

It's a classic case of a species invading our man-made spaces. But the irony is they're only here because we built those spaces to look like their original homes. Wow. What do you mean? Pigeons are cliff dwellers. Our skyscrapers, those are just concrete cliffs to them. Our ledges are their nesting sites. We built a perfect pigeon paradise and then got mad when they moved in.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

This is why we tend to see more pigeons in urban spaces. However, social observational studies have even shown that three-quarters of people in Paris who walked through tourist attractions, parks, and public transit stations did not interact with the pigeons they encountered.

SPEAKER_03 21:00

This was probably also exacerbated by the feeding bands present in Paris.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

That's especially interesting, since pigeons were once a prized pet among the upper classes in England in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. They were extremely well taken care of, and there was an entire hobby surrounding it called pigeon fancying. I kinda wish I could see one. Wow, I wonder what other ways pigeons were used in history. Pigeons were also used for pigeon racing in the working classes in England, in the late 1800s to the early 1900s, and were also a form of entertainment, where people would gamble money on what they thought was the winning pigeon. Kind of similar to horse races.

SPEAKER_03 21:37

It's really sad to see how our perception of pigeons has changed so drastically since then.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

What's even worse is that studies have shown in recent years that there have been a rise in the number of individuals that have stated that they would be okay if pigeons were eradicated.

SPEAKER_03 21:52

What? That's really surprising. Do people really want to completely eradicate pigeons? They seem so harmless.

SPEAKER_02 21:59

Yes. The study stated that there has been an increase from 20% to 50% of the individuals in the study that would support the eradication of pigeons. The study was also over a 12-year period, so this jump seems pretty significant.

SPEAKER_03 22:13

So it seems like the public perception of pigeons only seems to become worse and worse. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 22:19

I wonder what pest control methods are being used against these poor pigeons. That's a great question. Some cities, for example, Paris, have installed pigeon houses throughout their cities, and to limit the reproduction of pigeons, eggs are either removed or sterilized from these pigeon houses.

SPEAKER_03 22:34

Well, some might think that this doesn't really affect the species overall. Not only has it reduced the reproduction of pigeons, but it's also shortened their laying cycle from 11 weeks to four weeks, and has resulted in the quality of the eggs they produce being significantly reduced.

SPEAKER_02 22:50

Yeah. So not only have these reproductive control methods limited the populations of pigeons, it has also led to detrimental effects to the pigeons overall, even though they don't pose much of a threat to the general public. I see.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Yeah, another example of us deciding which species get to thrive, which ones don't, and when. So, are pigeons the villains, or are they just a mirror of our own history? Here's what Dr. Glazedale has to say about it. The final question I have for you is do you think that the perception of pigeons could be shifted from their current perception as a pest back to being considered either a useful tool or a companion?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Well, I like to think that it can be. Whether it can be or not, what time will tell. But I'm doing my part by going to like art fairs and presenting pigeon art, and people really enjoy it. People are been very receptive to it and respond to it. I'm wondering if we're at just one of these inflection points where maybe the in general people are starting to rethink their relationship with pigeons.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Well, I mean it's only been recently that people have started disliking them.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

True, recently meaning like decades through maybe about a century.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

So maybe we can start to shift that tide back again.

SPEAKER_02 24:04

Well, we spent 5,000 years breeding them to stay close to us, to love their home, and to be useful. Now that we have smartphones and other modern technology, we've decided we're done with them. But they're not done with us.

SPEAKER_03 24:17

Maybe the next time you see one, instead of shooing it away, you'll see the descendant of a war hero just trying to find its way back to the cliff we built for it. But of course, that's up to you.

SPEAKER_02 24:28

And thanks for listening to When Rats Fly. Why did we abandon the pigeon? I'm Joey. I'm Farron. And I'm Sanjuna.