this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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I've had a slight obession with them recently, is it possible?

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[–] MonkeyTown@midwest.social 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don’t know anything about it, so hopefully someone else has more experience, but I found this, so I assume the answer is yes.

https://pigeonpedia.com/how-to-train-a-carrier-pigeon/

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Great, this is much cheaper than my original plan of laying 9 kilometers of copper wire. Thanks!

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I hope you plan to follow the respective standard for avian carriers.

RFC 1149, RFC 2549 , and RFC 6214

[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Referring to the death of a pigeon as "packet loss" feels like some weird form of low-tech cyberpunk.

[–] MonkeyTown@midwest.social 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Carrier pigeons make an excellent bandwidth benchmark though.

Sneaker networks (flash drives stores in sneakers) are still some of the highest bandwidth out there.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To this day, nothing beats a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

[–] Hoimo@ani.social 2 points 2 months ago

The bandwidth of a station wagon just keeps increasing with advances in storage technology.

But a 10Gb/s line will do about 100TB in a day, so there's not that many situations left where you have enough data to make the station wagon worth the effort. Wikipedia has a few examples, with the most recent being a truck doing 100PB for AWS. I think we passed station wagon station 10 years ago.

[–] faercol@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago

Latency is abysmal though

[–] kryptonidas@lemmings.world 18 points 2 months ago

Here in the Netherlands the “pigeon racing” sport is still relatively alive, but does have an aging target group. Pigeons are driven somewhere many miles anyway, (well km’s) and released, first home gets a price.

There are breeders and trainers etc.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

if you’re really interested in pigeon behavior Rowan university in New Jersey has a pigeon lab for studying avian communication and cognition

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Well, I'm in Ireland, but thanks anyway!

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 months ago

So you definitely can’t go there easily but Gerald Hough is who does a lot of research on the abilities of homing pigeons and is available via email if you had specific questions

https://csm.rowan.edu/departments/psychology/research/aviancognition.html

Is his bio and email

[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago

Send him a pigeon, duh!

[–] Venator@lemmy.nz 1 points 2 months ago

A quick google and I found this: Irish Homing Union

[–] rowinxavier@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago

Wikipedia has your back

So yes, they are still possible to train and use, are in active use (for example in photography for rafting), and there are RFC standards relating to internet over carrier pigeon. Also, they are actually favourable compared with ADSL so yeah, a legitimate possible option for some cases.

[–] Hikermick@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There's a homing pigeon club not far from where I live.

I once went down a rabbit hole looking at falconry. In my state its heavy regulated, it's probably the same with pigeons.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't think that's correct. Most raptors are, I believe, regulated due to their conservation status. E.g., AFAIK, the only people that can legally kill raptors are people that belong to certain Native American tribes; simple possession of things like hawk feathers that you picked up from roadkill can be a felony.

Pigeons in general aren't really at any kind of conservation risk

[–] Hikermick@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

I don't doubt you're right nobody cares about the lowly pigeon, in fact some cities encourage nesting of raptors to keep their population in check. I do doubt any protected birds are allowed to be kept. Hawks are very common where I live, seeing a red tail or cooper's hawk is a daily occurance where I live so I assume the regulations are for humane treatment rather than preservation. My friend and his son came across a dead bald eagle while hiking and they kept it as they had a large skull collection. I looked it up and as you said it's against the law with very steep penalties so I advised him to make sure his son kept his mouth shut in school.

[–] rhythmisaprancer@moist.catsweat.com 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Since you've been obsessed with them lately, have you seen Who Is Cletis Tout? Great film that features some carrier pigeon action and an unconventional cast.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

happy cake day, ill take a look at it. Thanks!

[–] RBWells@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

I was walking in the neighborhood recently and passed a guy putting a pigeon in a high up box in his yard. It was such a an odd thing that I wasn't sure what was going on, and mentioned to my daughter that I thought this guy was keeping pigeons, and she said "because you saw him KEEPING PIGEONS?" Which I guess is fair, it just was so weird I wasn't sure!

I don't know if he uses them to send messages, but some people certainly have them at least as pets.

[–] thegr8goldfish@startrek.website -5 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] lnxtx@feddit.nl 10 points 2 months ago
[–] Bezier@suppo.fi 3 points 2 months ago

Gotta train new ones then.