A PIGEON POST

We humans are so arrogant. We automatically think that we are the smartest species on the planet. We all know about dolphins and whales....


Ants have complex societies, forming castes of "workers" "soldiers" and other specialized groups, living in virtual cities and occupying as much land area on earth as humans. The one pictured above is seen here taking a microchip home for his computer. What about Pigeons then?


Check out a pigeon city in Egypt.


First off, Pigeons and doves are the same creatures. They are from the bird family Columbidae. It seems that it’s people that make the distinction.


If they are white and pictured as a symbol of peace, they are doves. If there’s a load of them in your garden, they are pigeons.
Pigeons have no links to any other bird species. Unlike other birds (except flamingos) both sexes produce milk to feed their young.


If you have ever spent time feeding birds you will notice that the pigeons push the other bird species out of the way in an organized fashion.


….but when the food has been secured, they will share it between themselves evenly. This shows that they possess non-linguistic mathematical ability.


They are the only creatures, outside humans, that share. They can use the behaviour of another pigeon as a cue to tell them what response to make.


Pigeons can discriminate between other individual pigeons and themselves, can recognise themselves in a mirror and can differentiate between humans, even between two different human beings in a photograph. Think about it. Can you tell one pigeon from another?


In addition to creatures, pigeons can remember all 26 letters in the alphabet, plus they can learn complex actions and response sequences.


Researchers at Keio University in Japan found that pigeons can discriminate between paintings by Picasso and Chagall.


When shown a Picasso, the pigeon could obtain food by pecking but when it was a Chagall, pecking had no effect. Eventually, the pigeons only pecked when shown a Picasso. They were then able to correctly discriminate between works by the artists not previously shown.


Pigeons also have the unique ability to learn routes back to their home from far away. This homing behaviour is different from migration, because they can do it to order.


It has been put forward that pigeons are able to form "concepts" or "categories" similar to humans, but that interpretation is controversial. Nevertheless, the experiments remain important and often cited as examples in cognitive science. What we do know is that Pigeons have the equivalent intelligence to a three year old child in the processing of information.


This kid thinks the pigeon is just pooping on him. The pigeon is really saying "Hi".

This winter was a big one for pigeons. A man and his daughter were caught trying to smuggle un-hatched Cuban pigeons into the USA and sell the 72 illegal eggs online and through their pet shop in Miami.
The daughter was caught with the eggs in her luggage hidden in plastic Easter egg shells on a trip back to Miami from Cuba. They could face five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.


Sixty-seven rare breed pigeons, worth thousands, which were to be sold for racing were stolen from a loft at a farm in Essex.


In December a Chinese buyer paid a record $200,000 for Blue Prince, a racing pigeon at an auction in Belgium. Belgian racing pigeons are considered to be the world's best.
Chinese pigeon races have enormous prizes. One Shanghai race has a prize pool of
$1.31 million, with the winner getting about half that.