Messenger Pigeons/crows - GoT

[kcdusk]

My father in law races homing pigeons. You take the pigeons anywhere, release them, they come home. Back in the day you could attach a message to them and deliver hand written notes.

Watching Game of Thrones the other night, i noticed they were using crows to do the same thing.

Have crows ever been used this way before? Or is Game of Thrones not historically accurate?

[kato13]

As far as I know crows were never used as messengers as pigeons are simply much better. Ease of breeding, domestication, inability to escape (compared to crows) quickly come to mind.

Crows are insanely smart for animals and one experiment conducted by the military suggests that crows possibly taught their offspring how to recognize faces. They also have the ability to deduce the need to change the order of a complex sequence and have a very long memory.

If you were in a world without pigeons (though I remember Arya killing one a few episodes ago) I could see using crows, but in the end they probably just seemed cooler. And pretty much all news in Westeros is bad news so the Crow is more appropriate.

[Targan]

It's an established fantasy trope. In Tolkien's fictional universe crows and ravens are used as messengers.

[unkated]

My father in law races homing pigeons. You take the pigeons anywhere, release them, they come home. Back in the day you could attach a message to them and deliver hand written notes.

Watching Game of Thrones the other night, i noticed they were using crows to do the same thing.

Have crows ever been used this way before? Or is Game of Thrones not historically accurate?

Of course it's historically accurate! In Westeros, crows have been trained and used as efficient airborne messengers for millennia!

Read the books! ;)





Historically, on our earth, carrier pigeons were used, but of course, it was a one-way use. The pigeon was trained to fly from anywhere to home in one return location.

On our earth, crows and ravens were in recent decades determined to be rather smart as animals go. No one really studied with them in any domestic sense, since they mostly seemed nuisance animals.

In Westeros, Sages seem to be able to tell (program) crows where to go at need. That certainly makes them more versatile than homing pigeons.

In Tolkien's Middle-Earth (at least in the Hobbit), ravens seem to have been intelligent and friends of the Dwarves of Erebor (at least the ravens who lived near there). But then, the giant spiders were intelligent enough to understand when they were being insulted ("attercop is insultingto everyone"), and the Wargs (oversized wolves) were intelligent enough to knowingly hunt trespassing dwarves and to try to trap them. But then, the Hobbit is a fantasy and not bound by reality as found on our earth.

Then there is the subject of Poe's The Raven. I thought for years after hearing that poem in grade school that ravens could talk, sicne I knew someone with a Myna Bird, which was black and could talk...

Uncle Ted

[rcaf_777]

Messenger Pigeons were used by most of armies up till the start of World War II, as radio tech grew most armies used pigeons less and less. MI5 used them till the 1950's but only the Army Swiss maintained a force 30,000 past World War II.

In 1994 some 30,000 pigeons were "discharged" from army service, The Swiss army regarded them as a virtual unjammable way to transmit messages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_pigeon

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/swiss-army-sacks-carrier-pigeons-1450602.html

two other programs worth noting in this thread is the United States Navy Marine Mammal Program, which ran from 1960's till 2017, which used marine mammal to mark and remove under sea objects

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Marine_Mammal_Program

And the Soviets Anti-tank dogs in which each dog was fitted with a 10–12-kilogram (22–26 lb) mine carried in two canvas pouches adjusted individually to each dog. The mine had a safety pin which was removed right before the deployment. When the dog dived under the tank, a lever struck the bottom of the tank and detonated the charge. This was unsuccessfully used in Iraq by local insurgents.

Pigeons were also used as an aerial photography platform, with the CIA conducting test with a pigeon mounted camera in the 1970's. As camera tech grew smaller I could see this being more usefully.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_photography

New Carreer

Pigeon Keeper


Food for Thought

[kato13]

Pigeons were also used experimentally by the coast guard as spotters. They were trained to locate the emergency orange color and would be placed in a plastic pen below a helicopter. The pen had keys which the pigeons could tap when they saw something indicating a direction to the pilot.

The program was canceled due to budget cuts but the science behind it and the preliminary results seem sound.

http://www.uscg.mil/history/articles/PigeonSARProject.asp

[unkated]

From wikipedia:

During World War II, Project Pigeon (later Project Orcon, for "organic control") was American behaviorist B.F. Skinner's attempt to develop a pigeon-guided missile.[1]

The control system involved a lens, up to an array of three lenses at the front of the missile – using the same National Bureau of Standards-developed, unpowered airframe later used for the onboard radar-guided US Navy Bat glide missile – projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while one to three pigeons trained (by operant conditioning) to recognize the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile's flight controls, cause the missile to change course and slowly change the flight path towards its designated target.


Although skeptical of the idea, the National Defense Research Committee nevertheless contributed $25,000 to the research. However, Skinner's plans to use pigeons in glide bombs was considered too eccentric and impractical; although he had some success with the training, Skinner complained "our problem was no one would take us seriously."[2] The program was canceled on October 8, 1944, because the military believed that "further prosecution of this project would seriously delay others which in the minds of the Division have more immediate promise of combat application."
Project Pigeon was revived by the Navy in 1948 as "Project Orcon"; it was canceled in 1953 when electronic guidance systems' reliability was proven.

[Askold]

It's an established fantasy trope. In Tolkien's fictional universe crows and ravens are used as messengers.

If you have ways to actually talk to the birds (MAGIC!) then it would make sense to use the smarter crows. It should be easier to explain to them what to do than to the stupid pidgeons.

The setting of Song of ice and fire / Game of thrones had magic and magic is returning slowly, so it could be that they trained crows back in the old days and are still using them because of it.