Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media, I’m Micah Loewinger. This next audio mystery might teach us something remarkable about a seemingly unremarkable bird: the pigeon. 

Micah Loewinger: I first learned about this story from a fellow radio journalist, a man who happens to be a lifelong fan of pigeons.

Rober Krulwicht: Well, I'm a New York kid, so there were pigeons at the very beginning of my life. When I would go to the playground, there was my mommy, the baby carriage and the pigeon.

Micah Loewinger: Robert Krulwich is the co-creator and former co-host of Radiolab.

Robert Krulwich: When I would look at the pigeons, apparently, according to my mother, I would try to touch a pigeon that many people think that they're vermin and shouldn't be touched never occurred to me.

Micah Loewinger: And pigeons, oddly enough, played an integral role in early journalism.

Robert Krulwich: In media history, it was a guy named Israel Josephat. And he lived in Aachen, in Germany.

Micah Loewinger: In 1850, Josephat started a company that brought news to Aachen from Brussels faster than anyone else  

Robert Krulwich: There was a stock market in Brussels. And if you were over in Aachen, you'd want to know what was hot and what was cold and what was more and what was less. But you couldn't find that out unless you took the eight hour train. 

Micah Loewinger: There was a gap in the telegraph lines between these two cities so the train was the bottleneck. Until he realized that pigeons could fly from Brussels to Auchan in just 2 hours.

Robert Krulwich: You'd have to take them on the train to Brussels and then put messages on them in Brussels and they'd go up and then go right back to Germany… He would put a little satchel onto the pigeon and into that satchel. He'd place a little bit of information like, you know, “today the diamond price went up.” Or “get this, cantaloupes are selling down”… And he was the first one to know what was going on in Belgium about 5 hours before anyone else.

Micah Loewinger: And that in the press, as we both know, is a competitive edge.

Robert Krulwich: Oh, gosh, yes. 

Micah Loewinger: There’s actually a 1940 film about Josephat’s brilliant business.

Movie clip: Who is this man who trades in secrets? Who controls the most amazing dispatch system ever known. A lone pigeon soars into the sky, carrying a crumpled scrap of paper… 

Micah Loewinger: Who was this man? Why are we even talking about him? 

Robert Krulwich: Well, he changed his name to Mr. Reuters of the famous Reuters news service…

Micah Loewinger: It’s true. Reuters - the global news agency, was started with pigeons. Which is to say that while we take these birds for granted, or are simply grossed out by them, (they’re not called “rats with wings” for nothing), pigeons are embedded in the DNA of modern communication. 

Micah Loewinger: From the middle ages onwards, pigeons have been dutifully delivering the word; During the siege of Paris in 1870 pigeons flew thousands of messages to and from the city. Pigeons were awarded medals of honor for saving human soldiers in World War 1 and World War 2. 

Micah Loewinger: Which brings us to our final audio mystery of the show, a story that Robert wrote about for his blog on National Geographic dot com, a story that demonstrates how little we know about how pigeons do what they do. 

Robert Krulwich: One day, a guy named Tom Roden in Manchester, England, walks out the door of his house and he's going to walk the dog. 

Micah Loewinger: This is in 2002. 

Robert Krulwich: And he looks and he sees a pigeon sitting right there in front of his house. And he goes: “Oh! I know this pigeon!” It had a name. It was called Champion Whitetail. 

Micah Loewinger: This was the first time Tom had seen Champion Whitetail, his bird, in 5 years. 

News clip: He was a pigeon fancier and  this was one of his greatest birds…Champion Whitehill was a champion because it had won 13 races in its day. It had crossed the English Channel 15 times… And he hadn't seen it for five years because the last time he'd seen it, he'd sent it on a race and it hadn't come back.

News clip:  It was billed as the race of the century. Prize-winning birds from all over Britain were driven to France to mark the centenary of the Royal Pigeon Racing Society with a cross channel flight.  

Robert Krulwich: 60,000 birds were entered into that contest.

News clip: But many of the homing pigeons, carefully prepared by their owners, never returned.

Robert Krulwich: Tens of thousands of birds just didn't come back.

Micah Loewinger: Newspapers at the time had dubbed it “the great pigeon race disaster.”

Robert Krulwich: Right… these birds are trained and they're expensive. And then when five years later, one of those 10,000 birds suddenly shows up in Manchester and says hello to its boss, that's a thing…

Micah Loewinger: It sounds like there are two mysteries. What caused the great pigeon racing disaster of 1997?

Robert Krulwich: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: And where the hell has this pigeon been for five years? 

Robert Krulwich: That's right.

John Hagstrum: They were trying to figure out what the heck happened and they ended up trying to blame it on the weather. 

This is John Hagstrum.

John Hagstrum: I'm a geophysicist. I worked for the U.S. Geological Survey for 41 years and I'm now an emeritus there. 

Micah Loewinger: Like Robert, he’s been thinking about pigeons for decades, and he might have cracked the case of the royal race.

John Hagstrum: Queen Elizabeth’s birds were in this race. So it was a big deal. And there was a big inquiry. And I got ahold of the report on this inquiry.

News clip: Heavy rain –– the birds would just not face it. I think they spent hours and hours flying around the race point and just did not leave. 

John Hagstrum: Didn't quite make sense to me. But anyhow, it was part of the collection of races that I was able to find at that point that had been smashed for mysterious reasons…

John Hagstrum: And that's the term that the pigeon racers use when they let the birds go and for some reason, usually weather, the pigeons just go to roost and don't come back. 

Micah Loewinger: A trend began to form. There were a handful of other races like this across Europe. A year later, in 1998 –– this time in the US, on the East Coast –– there were two other smashed races on the same day. 

News clip: On Monday, 2,000 homing pigeons were released in Virginia, to begin their flight back to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Only 200 made it. The rest seem to have disappeared. In a separate pigeon race, from Western Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, 600 of the 800 birds are missing.

John Hagstrum: One was released in Virginia and one was released in western Pennsylvania. And they were both going back toward lofts in the Philadelphia area, and they actually intersected. 

Micah Loewinger: Maybe the birds were disrupted by something that happened around the moment the flight paths crossed.

John Hagstrum: Actually it was right over Harrisburg, where Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant was. So I got sort of sidetracked by nuclear plants… I called them up and I was very suspicious, you know. Did you have any high pressure gas releases or were you doing anything funny at this time on this day? And they denied it.

Micah Loewinger: You were a full on pigeon detective is kind of what I'm hearing. 

John Hagstrum: This is what you got to do! You gotta put on your gum shoes and go out. I was calling the Department of Transportation  –– had they been doing any blasting? I was even thinking of calling to see if Gettysburg, they were having any Civil War reenactments and, you know, shooting off a lot of cannons. But what really finally gave it away was I had been thinking about infrasound and I was reading infrasound papers. 

Micah Loewinger: Let me let me pull this back a little bit. What is infrasound?

John Hagstrum: Well, infrasound is basically sound at frequencies below our hearing range. Just as ultrasound is the hearing above our hearing range. Dog whistles and bats are all working in the ultrasonic ultrasound range, which is very high frequency. So very short wavelengths, but infrasound is below our hearing, so very long wavelengths.

Robert: If you're a pigeon. You can sense tones that are 12 octaves below middle C, So that would be beyond human hearing.

Jon Hagstrum: Pigeons were the first birds that were shown to be able to hear it. That was done at Cornell in the 1970s.

John Hagstrum The question of whether birds can hear infrasound is still contested among biologists. Anyway, Jon Hagstrum  Hagstrum was looking at this collection of races on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, the two Pennsylvania races and the royal race across the English Channel. What might connect them –– when he thought of the Concorde.

Ad clip: British Airways Concorde, the first supersonic airliner to fly you at twice the speed of sound.  

Robert: Those gorgeous planes that look … kind of like giant triangles with sort of curvy noses. 

John Hagstrum The now-retired plane that once transported movie stars from London Heathrow to New York’s John F Kennedy airport in less than half the time of a normal plane.

Ad clip:: The Concorde has crossed the Atlantic in 3 and a half hours. 

Jon Hagstrum : so when I finally saw a map of the Concorde route coming in towards JFK, I saw that it was pointed right at the intersection of these races. And I went, “Oh my God, that could be it.”

Micah Loewinger: A plane landing roughly 100 miles away from the pigeon races seems like a wild explanation until you consider what defined the Concorde…

Pilot on intercom: We should be supersonic about 10 minutes after take-off…

News clip: …escalating to Concords regular speed, twice the speed of sound

News clip: faster than a rifle bullet! 23 miles every minute.

Robert: Now, when a plane breaks the sound barrier, it is constantly sending little sonic booms in its path. Boom Boom Boom.

Jon Hagstrum : They are quite loud. I actually heard one once as a geologist way out in the field in Montana. I thought it was an atomic bomb…

[SOUND OF SONIC BOOM]

Micah Loewinger: This is why supersonic flight over land in the US was outlawed in 1973, because the sonic booms could break windows and freak people out. Hence, why the Concorde mostly flew over the Atlantic.

Jon Hagstrum: The Concorde is pushing the sonic boom like a bow wave of a boat. And when it slows down and goes subsonic, that wave keeps going. And the thing is the audible sound in that wave gets absorbed by the atmosphere relatively quickly. But the very low frequency infrasound wave just keeps going and going and going. 

Micah Loewinger: He crunched the numbers with the two US races.

Jon Hagstrum: The first thing I did was just … a few back of the envelope calculations. I know sort of how fast pigeons fly. I know how fast … sound moves through the atmosphere….So I could calculate when this sonic boom came and hit and was there an intersection between the pigeons racing course when the pigeons were there and the sonic boom wave coming through and it matched it matched for one of the races. 

Micah Loewinger: But, the timing didn’t match for the other race because…

Jon Hagstrum: they had actually delayed releasing the pigeons so that they actually released them after the Concorde should have landed at JFK. So I called up this guy, I'll never forget his name was Rob Hasbini, and he was with Air France at JFK. And I said, “in order for my calculations to work, your plane had to be late over 2 hours that day.” And he said, “This is the Concorde. We're never 2 hours. Are you kidding? It's only 3 hours from Paris.” So I said, please, it's a scientific question. Will you please look it up? And he said, quote, “Are you a magician? It was two and a half hours late that day.” 

Micah Loewinger: Wow.

Jon Hagstrum:  Those are one of the moments you live for as a scientist. When you make a prediction and somebody tells you you were right. 

that day.” 

Micah Loewinger: So let’s return to the 1997 Royal Centenary Race across the English channel…

Jon Hagstrum: The Concorde SST leaving Paris goes subsonic until it gets over water because they don’t want to lay down a boom carpet right along the English Channel. And so I basically calculated that the birds that had been released in Paris in the centenary race in 1997 would have been crossing the channel, just as the Concorde would have been going supersonic down the channel on its way to New York… [00:13:04] you standing there wouldn't hear a thing, but the birds would be rocked by this boom. You know, it would be quite loud to them. But it's below our hearing.

Micah Loewinger: Which would explain why the fanciers in Nantes had blamed it on the weather… 

Pigeon Expert: The majority wouldn’t go through that belt of rain. They might try to go around it, but depending on the distance this could tire them out.
CNN: It’s thought that the pigeons are just resting up somewhere in France before completing their flight across the channel.

Micah Loewinger: Let’s go back to Tom Roden in Manchester and his prized pigeon, Champion Whitetail, who returned home five years after the race…

Tom Roden: because the bird was a news story in England, in Manchester. It got into the newspapers and maybe from Reuters for all I know ––

Micah Loewinger: I don't know if that's true, but I'd love it if it were. (laughing) 

Tom Roden: Yeah. So people could read that story wherever they lived and it turned out that there was a guy in Nantes, who read the story.

 Micah Loewinger: And he wrote a letter to Tom Roden saying essentially.

Tom Roden: “Wait a second, wait a second. On the very day of that race, I walked into my backyard and there was a shaggy sad-ass bird sitting in my backyard looking terribly exhausted. And it had a little ringlit on its foot. And I wrote down the number of the bird then, he walked the bird to the Museum of Natural History in Nantes and said, “Here I found this bird.” And then the museum took it. And presumably they eventually released it. So that was two weeks after the race. We now have four and a half years without a lot time.

 Micah Loewinger: A lot of unaccounted for time!

Micah Loewinger: The fact is we really don’t know how Champion Whitetail made its way home after 5 years. For John Hagstrum, the geophysicist behind the Concorde theory, there’s a more fundamental question about how Champion Whitetail or any pigeon makes these long journeys …

Jon Hagstrum : : the big mystery that's still afoot is what is … how do they know where they are relative to home?… For humans or basically anyone to navigate. You need a map and a compass. And a compass –– I think everybody knows what that is –– it will tell you directions. Are you going north, south, east or west? … And birds have compasses and they're pretty well understood. Pigeons in particular have a sun compass. They have a magnetic compass. Just the way we do. Night migrating birds can use the stars as a compass. But the big question is… what is the map? 

Micah Loewinger: He has a theory, which gets pretty heady, an idea he outlined in the Journal of Experimental Biology, though none of this has been tested with pigeons in a controlled setting....

Jon Hagstrum : This is where I'm getting more into maybe you could say somewhat speculation… What I'm basically saying is that the pigeons can hear the landscape.

Micah Loewinger: Their map is made up of the infrasound emanating from the world below.

Jon Hagstrum: the ground surface is moving ever so slightly because of what are called microseisms. And microseisms are generated by waves in the deep ocean… what I'm talking about exists. But whether or not the pigeons are using it is speculation.

Robert: if you're a bird flying over a place you've never been before…

Robert: the sound …[00:24:03]  that will come from the air off the hills and off the valleys and off the rooftops and off the tumbling waves on the surface of water, off the calm water, which will tell you what's underneath you… birds can, in effect, see with their ears.

Micah Loewinger: They can feel the topography of the earth and the sea.

Jon Hagstrum: Infrasound has such huge wavelengths and pigeons have such a small distance between their ears that they can't really tell … its direction if they're just sitting still.. And so what pigeons do when they're released is… they fly in these big circles. And people have always wondered, “what are they doing?” I think what they're doing is Doppler shifting the low frequency signals. So when they're heading toward the signal, the frequency goes up. When they're headed away from the signal, the frequency goes down.

Micah Loewinger: So they can derive directional information by hearing the change in pitch from the infrasound source.

Jon Hagstrum: Correct.

Micah Loewinger: How do we know it's not something much simpler like they just form a familiarity through eyesight –– they understand the landscape and they remember it the same way we do.
John: It's a good question! That's been studied. And they have actually put… little frosted goggles on pigeons so they can use their Sun Compass. That's their dominant compass. They can see the compass through these frosted lenses, but they can't see anything else… If you let them go, they can get within a couple of kilometers of their loft. But they have to see it to be able to fly in and land in their loft.

Micah Loewinger: So you're proposing that for the majority of the navigation, even across places they've maybe never been before. They're using this infrasound detection.

Jon Hagstrum : That's correct.

Robert: I don't know. It's one of those things that brings me to question of the “umwelt,” which is a German word, which says, look, all of the creatures that live on this planet … All of them have their own abilities and their own way of experiencing being on earth, and…this story points up the deep mystery when two species decide to do something together. In this case, humans say, “Let's race!” and the bird says, “I'm for it!” And then off they go. But then what goes on in the bird's mind and what goes on in the people's mind are different things. And it's very hard to cross that sort of barrier of no understanding, of nothing shared. “Umvelt” is the word that says that each creature lives really in its own sensual universe. We can do things with each other. But can we understand what's going on in each other? No, we can't. And that's to me, a kind of beautiful thing.

Micah Loewinger: Robert, thank you very much.

Robert: You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

Micah Loewinger: This seems like a fitting place to end an episode about mysteries. The umwelt is a concept about the limits of knowledge, but it’s also a reminder for humility. Mysteries demand answers. And there’s an implicit morality in the work of the scientist, investigative journalist, movie detective asking questions and following clues. But it’s worth pausing to consider what we might justify on the hunt for truth — like brash accusations in case of Havana Syndrome, or the hoovering up of personal data in the name of solving crime. The fact is sometimes you end up with more questions than answers… and that’s okay.

Micah Loewinger: And, weirdly, pigeons played an integral role in early journalism.

Micah Loewinger: That’s it for this week’s show. On The Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wong and Suzanne Gaber, with help from Temi George. And our show was edited by our Executive Producer Katya Rogers. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Sham Sundra. Jared Paul did the sound design. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I’m Micah Loewinger, Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. 

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