This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger, filling in this week for Brooke Gladstone. This next audio mystery might teach us something remarkable about a seemingly unremarkable bird, the pigeon. I first learned about this story from a fellow radio journalist, a man who happens to be a lifelong fan of pigeons.

Robert Krulwich: 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. I spoke to him earlier this year when this story first aired.

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: Weirdly, pigeons played an integral role in early journalism.

Robert Krulwich: In media history, it's some guy named Israel Josaphat. He lived in Aachen in Germany.

Micah Loewinger: In 1850, Josaphatat 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 Aachen in just two 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, today the diamond price went up, or these cantaloupes are selling down. Then he was the first one to know what was going on in Belgium maybe five hours before anyone else.

Micah Loewinger: 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 Josaphatat's brilliant business.

Man from Movie: Who is this man who trades in secrets? This man who controls the most amazing dispatch system ever known? A lone pigeon sores into the skies carrying a crumpled scrap of paper.

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

Robert Krulwich: 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, I know some of you are grossed out by them, they're not called rats with wings for nothing, pigeons are embedded in the DNA of modern communication. 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 I and World War II.

Which brings us to our final audio mystery of the show, a story that Robert wrote about for his blog on nationalgeographic.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. 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 five years.

Robert Krulwich: He was a pigeon fancier, and this was one of his greatest birds. It had won 13 races in its day, it had crossed the English Channel 15 times, so it was a real professional racing bird, 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.

Reporter 1: 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.

Report 1: 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: The newspapers at the time had dubbed it the Great Pigeon Race Disaster [laughs].

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. One is, what caused the great pigeon racing disaster of 1997, and where the hell has this pigeon been for five years? [laughs]

Robert Krulwich: That's right.

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

Micah Loewinger: This is John Hagstrum.

John Hagstrum: I'm a geophysicist. I worked for the US 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 very big deal, and there was a big inquiry and I got a hold of the report on this inquiry.

Male Speaker 5: Heavy rain. The birds just would not face it. I think they spent hours and hours flying around the race point and just did not leave.

John Hagstrum: There was some rain offshore, but I don't really remember there being rain right along the route of the race, so it didn't quite make sense to me. 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. 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.

Reporter 14: 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: They were both going back toward lofts in the Philadelphia area. 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 sidetracked by nuclear plants. I called them up and I was very suspicious, "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 are a full on pigeon detective, is what I'm hearing.

John Hagstrum: [laughs] Well, yes. This is what you got to do. I was calling the Department of Transportation, had they'd been doing any blasting? I was even thinking of calling to see if Gettysburg, they were having any civil war reenactments and shooting off a lot of cannons. What really finally gave it away was I had been thinking about infrasound and I was reading infrasound papers.

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

John Hagstrum: 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 ultrasound range, which is very high frequencies, so very short wavelengths. Infrasound is below our hearing, and so it has very long wavelengths.

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

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

Micah Loewinger: The question of whether birds can hear infrasound is still contested among biologists. Anyway, John 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, and he was thinking, "What might connect to them?" when he thought of the Concorde.

Male Announcer: British Airways, Concorde, the first supersonic passenger airliner to fly you with more than twice the speed of sound.

Robert Krulwich: Those gorgeous planes that look like giant triangles with curvy noses.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Male Announcer: The Concorde has crossed the Atlantic in three and a half hours.

Jon Hagstrum: 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 went, "Oh my God, that could it."

Micah Loewinger: A plane landing 200 miles away from the pigeon races seems like a wild explanation until you consider what defined the Concorde.

Pilot: We should be supersonic about 10 minutes after takeoff.

Male Speaker 6: Escalating to Concorde's regular speed, Mach 2, twice the speed of sound.

Male Speaker 7: Faster than a rifle bullet. 23 miles every minute.

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

Jon Hagstrum: They are quite loud. I actually heard one once. As a geologist, I was way out in the field in Montana and I heard one.

[bang]

Jon Hagstrum: I thought it was an atomic bomb.

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. 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 crunches the numbers with the two US races.

Jon Hagstrum: The first thing I did was, back to the envelope, calculations. I know how fast pegions fly, I know how fast sound moves through the atmosphere, so I could calculate when this sonic boom came and hit. Was there an intersection between the pigeon's 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: The timing didn't match for the other race because--

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

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Wow.

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

Micah Loewinger: Let's return to the 1997 Royal centenary race across the English Channel.

Jon Hagstrum: The Concorde, 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. I basically calculated that the birds that had been released in Paris in the centenary race in 1997 would have been passing over, crossing the channel just as the Concorde would have been going supersonic down the channel on its way to New York. You standing there wouldn't hear a thing, but the birds would be rocked by this boom. It would be quite loud to them, but it's below out hearing.

Micah Loewinger: Which would explain why the fanciers in [unintelligible 00:43:38] had blamed it on the weather.

Male Speaker 8: The majority wouldn't try to go through that belt of rain, they would attempt to go round it, but of course, depending on the distance, this could tire them out.

Reporter 1: It's thought the pigeons are now 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, among others. That story got passed around.

Micah Loewinger: I don't know if that's true but I'd love it if it were [laughs].

Tom Roden: These people could read that story wherever they lived, and it turned out that there was a guy in [unintelligible 00:44:26] who read the story--

Micah Loewinger: He wrote a letter to Tom Roden saying essentially--

Tom Roden: Wait a second. On the very day of that race, I walked into my backyard, and there was a shaggy sad ass looking bird sitting in my backyard, looking terribly exhausted. It had a little ringlet on it's foot. I wrote down the number of the bird, then walked the bird to the Museum of Natural History in [unintelligible 00:44:55] and said, "Here, I found this bird," and then the Museum took it. Presumably, they eventually released it. That was two weeks after the race. We now have four and a half years to account for.

[laughter]

Micah Loewinger: That is a lot of unaccounted time [laughs]. The fact is, we really don't know how champion Whitetail made its way home after five years. For Jon 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, how do they know where they are? Relative to home, for humans or basically anyone to navigate, you need a map and a compass. A compass, I think everybody knows what that is. It'll tell you directions. Are you going North, South, East, or West. Birds have compasses, and they're pretty well wanted 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 that?

Micah Loewinger: He has a theory which gets pretty heady. It's an idea that 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 speculation. What I'm basically saying is that the the pigeons can hear the landscape.

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

Jon Hagstrum: The ground surface is moving ever so slightly because of what a called microseisms. The 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 more speculation.

Robert Krulwich: If you were a bird flying over a place you've never been before, there will be rumbling sound 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 or 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: An infrasound has such huge wavelengths, and pigeons have such a small distance between there ears, that they can't really tell direction if they're just sitting still. What pigeons do when they're released is they circle, they fly and these big circles. People have always wondered, "What are they doing?" I think what they're doing is dopler shifting the low frequency signals. when they're heading towards the signal, the freuency goes up. when they're headed away from the signal, the freuency goes down.

Micah Loewinger: I see. They can drive directional information by hearing the change in pitch from the infrasound sound source?

Jon Hagstrum: Correct.

Micah Loewinger: How do we know it's not something much simpler like they just form a familiarity just through eyesight? They understand the landscape and they remember it the same way we do?

Jon Hagstrum: Good question. That's been studied. They have actually put little goggles, frosted goggles on pigeons so that 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 at their loft.

Micah Loewinger: You're proposing that for the majority of the navigation they're doing, even across places they've maybe never been before, they're using this infrasound detection?

Jon Hagstrum: That's correct.

Robert Krulwich: I don't know how plausible that is or how much to believe in it, I don't know. It's one of those things that brings me to the question of the umwelt which is a German word, which says, look, all the creatures that live on this planet, all of them have their own abilities and their own way of experiencing being on earth. 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.

Then, what goes on in the birds mind, and what goes on in the people's minds are just different things. It's very hard to cross that barrier of no understanding, of nothing shared. Umwelt is the word that says that each creature lives, really, in its own central universe. We can do things with each other, but can we understand what's going on in each other? No, we can't. That's to me, a beautiful thing.

Micah Loewinger: Robert, thank you very much.

Robert Krulwich: You're welcome.

[MUSIC - Wallpaper: Woo]

Micah Loewinger: The umwelt seems like a fitting place to end this episode. After all, the concept describes how even though we all share the same world, how our fellow creatures and our fellow humans experience it will always be something of a mystery. For me as a radio producer, I wanted to make this episode because I'm fascinated by sound. That's our medium, it's our bread and butter. Here's to the fluctuating hum of the grid and the vibrations that emanate from the very land we walk on, and to compassion for those whose experiences we can only guess at.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Suzanne Gaber with help from Shaan Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, of course. Our engineer this week was Andrew Nerviano, and a big thanks to Jared Paul for his scoring and sound design. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC studios. I'm Micah Loewinger.

[00:50:57] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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