#homing pigeons

A flock of homing pigeons has taken up residence on our roof. How do we know they’re homing pigeons? They’re all banded, they’re very sleek and well-fed, and they seem a bit lost.

They stand on our skylights and look down at us with beaky expectation, as if we know what to do better than they. I think what they’d like to do is move on, but they’re not quite sure to where.

It’s migration season all over the world, creatures on the move. And whether out of habit, necessity or instinct, migration is always a dicey venture.

Billions of birds migrate every year, and every year it gets a little harder for them. Ornithologists at the Max-Planck Institute estimate that up to 10 billion migratory song birds don’t make it from their point of departure to their destination, and statistics are pointing to a 50 percent overall loss of the world’s songbird population in just the past 40 years.

Five of a flock of seven homing pigeons trying to figure out their next steps. Photos: PK Read

Four of a flock of seven homing pigeons trying to figure out their next steps.
Photos: PK Read

What’s happening?

There are the old culprits of hunting, with some cultures clinging to archaic trapping methods of capturing tiny birds that make barely a mouthful.

I think of these habits, which are worldwide and involve different birds in each region, and when they must have begun.

Was it out of a sense of longing, that the eating something so delicate and that sang so sweetly would somehow impart some of that fleeting beauty to clumsy, earthbound humans? Was it out of basic hunger and the seasonal availability? Was it out of a sense of plenty, just so many of damn things that putting a few dozen in a pie would make no difference?

These days, it seems like people do it just because they can. And old habits die hard.

Migratory bird routes mapped and animated by Movebank, a project of Max Planck Institute of Ornithology, which collects and communicates migration research for a wide variety of migratory animals. Click here for a beautiful film of routes across Eurasia.
Source: Movebank

But beyond hunting, there are the bugaboos of climate change and, probably most relevant, habitat loss. Not just the habitats where the birds overwinter or breed, but the flyover areas. The navigational abilities of the migrating flocks are considerable, but can’t necessarily account for all the new human settlements in areas that used to be resting zones, or dark areas now illuminated by city lights, or absent wetlands, or all those windows that look like sky.

The good news is that there are a number of technological innovations and legislative solutions underway to try and stop some of the songbirds from ending up against a window instead of their summer home, or being confused by light smog.

What will our visiting pigeons do to find their way home? I wish I knew where they needed to go – they certainly keep looking in at me as if I do.

Hopefully, they’ll just be circling, as they do right now, and the right flight path will suddenly occur to them.

Raven’s Breath
Photo: Doug Dance

Before I started this post on talking turtles this morning, I moseyed over to Wikipedia to see what words we use to describe acoustic communications between turtles. Dogs bark, geese hiss, tapirs whistle, giraffes bleat and most rodents squeak – at least, that’s what they do when we’re talking about them in English.

But turtles? Apparently, turtles have always been considered voiceless.

As of last year, we’ve known that some turtles use chirps, clicks, meows and clucks to communicate with one another. Just not at levels we were ever able to hear before the advent of modern sound equipment.

Yellow-Spotted Amazon River Turtle
Artist: Brin Edwards

But even among the animals that produce vocalizations we can hear, conversations take place that remain out of our range.

Giraffes don’t really bleat much, but they do communicate via low-frequency moans and grunts. Sumatran rhinos, for example, have been found to emit low frequency whistles that might travel up to 9.8 km (6.1 mi).

In terms of all we’re not hearing, it’s not a one-way street. Animals of all kinds can hear the infrasonic melody being sung by the earth’s surface and waters – migratory birds use it to navigate, homing pigeons use it to find their way back to their lofts.

Sources of infrasound signals that can be detected by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s listening stations.
Note that this graphic doesn’t include any of the sounds discussed here, mainly because the signals being listened for by these infrasound stations are either disaster-related or human-generated.
Graphic: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization

Pulling on this thread of unheard sounds brought me to the story of some tamarin monkeys in the Central Park Zoo who were found to be whispering about a particular zoo supervisor, a person associated with unpleasant medical examinations.

The tamarins had, for a time, responded to the threat of his presence with screeches and loud vocalizations. After a while, however, researchers found that the monkeys switched to low frequency communication when the supervisor approached, as if to better discuss the real threat level and necessary response.

Golden lion tamarins
Artist: Sally Landry

I started with turtles, but all these whispering monkeys comforting one another and a soft-spoken earth put me in mind of one of my favorite films, Wim Wender’s 1987 Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). Two angels spend immortality listening to all the unspoken thoughts of humanity, the inward whispers no one else can hear. They offer succor where they can.

But one of the angels becomes so entranced by a lonely woman that he decides to become human just so he can experience the world as humans do, from the taste of food to the emotion of love. All of which had been abstract to him, because he could only hear one kind of communication.

Listening closely, in the end, made the angels want to experience the lives of humans more closely, to protect those assigned to their care beyond offering simple words of reassurance.

Maybe listening closely will have the same effect on us?

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Never cry over spilt milk. It could've been champagne. Or whisky.

Just Passing Through

Unexpected Communication