Original photo by Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/ Alamy Stock Photo
Pigeons tend to get a bad rap among urban dwellers, but the birds have a distinguished history of service. Bred for their instinctive ability to find their way home from long distances, homing pigeons were trained as message-bearers as far back as in ancient Egypt. With their deployment by besieged Parisians during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the era of the military pigeon was underway.
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It's a factA 2016 study demonstrated that pigeons could be trained to pick out words from a group of nonwords, marking the first time that a nonprimate was shown to have an orthographic brain.
By the time the United States entered World War I, homing pigeons were being used on both sides of the fighting for their ability to reliably deliver progress updates from planes, tanks, and mobile lofts on the front lines. While telephone and radio communications were more advanced heading into World War II, there were still times when conditions rendered such technologies useless, and the only solution was to strap a message to a pigeon and send it airborne through a hail of gunfire. Sometimes, a lone bird’s efforts saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers: One such instance occurred in Italy in 1943, when an American pigeon named G.I. Joe was dispatched to an Allied air base in the nick of time to call off the planned bombing of a village that had just been liberated by British troops.
That year, White Vision, Winkie, and Tyke became the first three of the 32 pigeons to receive the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) Dickin Medal for exceptional wartime accomplishments. Although the award came into being too late to honor pigeon predecessors like Cher Ami and President Wilson, the more recent creation of the Honorary PDSA Dickin Medal in 2014 honored all the winged warriors and other service animals who served during World War I. And although the PDSA is based in the U.K., the Dickin Medal is awarded to animals in theaters of war around the world, and recognized worldwide.
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The sense that enables pigeons to perceive direction via Earth’s magnetic field is ______.
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The sense that enables pigeons to perceive direction via Earth’s magnetic field is magnetoreception.
One cat has won the Dickin Medal.
That would be Simon, a tomcat who had the misfortune of getting caught in the strife of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. A crew mascot aboard the British HMS Amethyst, Simon sustained shrapnel injuries when the ship was attacked and cornered by communist forces on the Yangtze River. Not only did Simon get back on his feet and provide comfort to his rattled shipmates, but he also fought off the rats that attempted to raid the dwindling food supply as the crew waited for weeks for safe passage to freedom. Simon then became something of a celebrity after the Amethyst made news with its escape to Hong Kong, with a designated “cat officer” assigned to handle his fan mail. Sadly, the battle-scarred feline died shortly before he was scheduled to receive his Dickin Medal late in 1949, although TIME magazine provided an additional salute by featuring his picture on its obituary page.
Tim Ott has written for sites including Biography.com, History.com, and MLB.com, and is known to delude himself into thinking he can craft a marketable screenplay.
