homing pigeon

Homing Pigeon was something that people relied on in the past. No one had cell phones to call people. They only had landlines to get into contact with people. If the landlines weren’t working thy had pigeons fly and send messages to the people that they needed to get into contact with. How they would get the information to the other person is they would attach something on the bird and would exchange words with the person. You would send the bird back and forth with the person that you were trying to communicate with until your landlines started working again. The homing pigeon first started centuries ago during the Olympics. It first became popular in 776 B.C and kept happening for years. It now is not a thing people do anymore because we have so much technology such as computers and cell phones. Flying messenger pigeons was already established as early as 3000 years ago. Thye used the pigeon to claim who the winner was of the ancient Olympics. Messenger pigeons were used as early as 1150 in Baghdad and also later by Genghis Khan. The pigeons were bred and kept in a room of the zoological institute at the university in frankfurt Main. around twelve adult birds were given a dose of anesthesia and then decapitated. What they did was the skin of the upper beak was isolated by ceramic blades and titanium.”Because there are no chemical methods to directly identify magnetite (Fe2+3Fe+2O4), we first looked histochemically for concentrations of Fe+3 in the light microscope by using the Prussian Blue (PB) reaction on fixed tissue. In the presence of Fe+3 and HCl+ potassium hexacyanoferrate turns into dark blue ferric ferrocyanide.” (Wiley Online Library, google scholar). There was so much that had to be put through in order for the homing pigeon to work. Scientists have done a bunch of experiments to find a way to make it work. “Birds with an induced field of 0.6 gauss and the south magnetic pole up, oriented toward home normally under both sun and overcast. Birds with the polarity reversed oriented toward home when the sun was visible but often flew away from home under overcast.” (Science, google scholar). I have never heard of a homing pigeon until we had this project. When I first searched it I was really confused people it was just a bunch of photos of pigeons. I had to search it up to see if I was searching the right thing. It is really interesting to read about and didn’t realize how much effort scientists put in to make this work.