Cheri Ami, savior of WWI’s “Lost Battalion”
Photo: Smithsonian Institution.
Pigeon with WWI spy camera affixed
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Pigeons’ High Perch in Human History Often Overlooked
By Kevin McKeon, Maine Master Naturalist
The Royal Air Force torpedo bomber Bristol Beaufort was headed home, flying over the treacherous North Sea on a winter’s raw stormy afternoon in February 1942. She had completed her mission to disrupt German shipping operations off the coast of Norway. The crew was thinking of full bellies and warm beds when anti-aircraft fire hit the plane, destroying an engine; there was no choice but to ditch in the icy, angry North Sea. The radio operator sent a hurried SOS signal, but system damage and miserable weather resulted in reception of a faint garbled message at home base RAF Leuchars. Upon crashing into the sea, the Bristol Beaufort tore apart. The crew survived the crash but were soaked to their skin; hypothermia quickly affected the unfortunate souls who huddled in a lone life raft, adrift amidst the foamy black sea.
Since the 1800s, Britain has been home to an active pigeon racing community with thousands of dedicated racers. To aid the war effort, over 100,000 of these birds were donated for use as messaging. Pigeon racing was suspended, and corn was rationed to ensure valuable pigeon food was available! Hunters were dispatched to kill hawks and falcons along the rocky coast, mortal enemies of pigeons. All Royal Air Force war planes carried pigeons in special watertight containers to allow communications with RAF home bases and aid in search and rescue operations.
The Bristol Beaufort’s muddled SOS was too faint for Leuchars to locate the crash site; the crew seemed doomed to an icy grave. Miraculously, popping up from the waters was the last crew member: “NEHW.40.NS.I,” known to the crew as Winkie, in her watertight box. Drenched with icy sea water and coated with oil from the crash, she was dispatched into the cold, black, stormy skies — the crew’s last hope for survival. Off she flew, message canister affixed, making a beeline for her home 125 miles away. She landed her exhausted, oil-coated body at her home — George Ross’s pigeon coop in suburban Dundee — after a 16-hour flight through a North Sea winter storm’s tempest.
Upon Mr. Ross’s telephone call to RAF, rescue operations were immediately activated. There was little hope of finding the freezing crew, bobbing in a tiny raft somewhere in the churning North Sea. But a savvy duty sergeant combined wind direction with the time and location of the SOS message and computed the approximate crash site. The crew was found and later feted with a special dinner, where Winkie was honored for saving the crew by her miraculous flight through the blustery Norwegian storm. She was bestowed with the Dickin Medal, the British animal equivalent of our Congressional Medal of Honor. Winkie is preserved and proudly memorialized at The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum. A bronze statue commemorates her heroic flight, sitting at the floodgates of the flood defenses development beside the river Tay at Beach Crescent. 54 Dickin Medals were awarded to animals during WWII: 18 to dogs, three to horses, one to a cat — and 32 to pigeons. Pigeons contributed to more than 700 such British rescues and completed over 11,000 wartime flights for the U.S. Navy during WWI.
Fossil history from Israel indicates pigeons are at least 300,000 years old. The ancestors of our pigeons were the rock doves, which still exist today in their native areas around the Mediterranean Sea, North Africa and Southeast Asia, where they nest along rocky cliffs. Solid evidence of these wild birds’ domestication goes back at least 5,000 years, possibly 10,000 years. Mesopotamian and Egyptian stone hieroglyphs and even older Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets reveal references to rock doves. During many millennia of domestication, birds escaped and some were intentionally let loose, becoming the pigeons we know today.
Rock doves, feral pigeons and pigeons are all the same species, Columba livia: “Dove with a lead gray hue.” All are commonly called pigeons. Rock doves are the undomesticated wild doves of Southern Eurasia, and feral pigeons are the “naturalized domesticated escapees” — those that thrive among humans, replacing their preferred rocky crags with our building ledges, rooftops and windowsills. Originally brought to the U.S. by French settlers as a food source, there are now over 300 pigeon varieties worldwide, able to produce six to nine broods per year, with chicks fledging at 35 days old. Feral pigeons are ubiquitous everywhere except Antarctica. They can live up to 15 years in captivity, though three to five years is common in the wild. These birds are monogamous, mate for life, and the pair both produce a highly nutritious milk in their crop to feed their young, allowing a doubling of growth in two days, half adult size in two weeks, and full size in 25 days. About 30% of their weight is devoted to flight muscles, and at six wingbeats per second and 700 heartbeats per minute, pigeons can sprint over 90 miles per hour and fly 700 miles per day!
Their incredible speed, stamina, and homing instincts have been exploited throughout the historical record, being used for messaging during the reign of the Greeks, Romans, and Genghis Khan, WWI, and WWII. Pigeons have an approximate 95% message delivery success rate. During The Cold War, CIA’s “Operation Tacona” strapped miniature cameras to them as they flew over various Russian areas of interest. During WWI, the famous pigeon Cher Ami delivered the location of what was to become known as “The Lost Battalion” during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in October 1918. Credited with saving the battalion, he was shot shortly after dispatch, arriving with the message hanging from a ligament of his eventually amputated leg. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster for his heroic service, and the Animals in War and Peace Medal of Bravery at a 2019 ceremony on U.S. Capitol Hill. He died from his wounds 10 months later, and proudly sits today at The Price of Freedom: Americans at War exhibit at The National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
So, as we enjoy Sanford’s urban trail network, maybe take a deeper recognition of the pigeons we see, knowing that they’re among the most influential birds of human history.
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