Store, Carry, Forward: The Networking Genius of Pigeons - EMF 2026

Hello everyone. Thank you for having me. Uh, I'm Holly and I'm going to be talking to you today about why I personally think pigeons are a brilliant way of moving information around. Um, so two things. One, I know in the description for today's talk, I did promise puns. Uh, it does turn out with four weeks turnaround, it's quite hard to write a lot of very pigeon specific puns. Um, so some of them are just going to be kind of generally about birds, so do forgive me, please. Uh, and number two, with a lot of technical talks, so I know people quite often dive straight into the technical detail. I wanted to make sure I'm not losing anyone in this talk. I know it's quite a technical topic. So, uh, we're just going to start with a very quick introduction. Thank you. Okay. So, um I can't see you guys that well because of the lights. So, I'm going to have to ask for a small amount of audience participation through the medium of yelling. Um so, we're just going to do a couple of quickfire questions calibrate the information in the room. So, can by the medium of yelling, can you let me know, have you ever seen a pigeon before? >> Thank you for going with this. Uh so, I think probably most people when they think of pigeons thinking of the image on screen. Um, so all these photos are taken my friend by my friend who works for the zoo as a researcher. So when I text him saying I'm giving a talk about pigeons, he said, "Can I send you the 25 pictures of pigeons that are currently on my phone?" Uh, so this is one of them. This is another one of them. And this is another one of them. Uh, which I thought was particularly fierce. Uh, so we know what pigeons look like. Uh, who has seen a pigeon's nest before? Nice. Okay. So, if you spend a lot of time on the kinds of websites that I do, uh there are lots of jokes about the rubbish nature of uh pigeon nests, they generally tend to look a bit like this. However, in defense of pigeons, they have largely evolved to nest on cliffs. And so, uh mostly those twigs are just there to stop the the eggs from rolling off a ledge. Uh so to be fair to them, if they're nesting in human terms, uh in human environment, maybe, you know, they they haven't quite caught up in terms of architectural brief. Uh so then we're going to do a couple of quick true false statements. So again, I'm just going to ask you to yell in some way if you think these statements are true, and we are going to whip through them. Uh pigeons fly around 15 miles an hour. >> A bit. Okay. Uh so actually they can fly up to about 90 miles an hour. Uh although they do average about 50 over long distances, but pretty good I would say. Uh next statement. So there's two of three. Uh the Victorians domesticated pigeons. Yell if you think that might be true. Oh, I'm getting some people yelling false, which is helpful. Uh so I've got a better picture. Uh so in fact, people probably have been domestic pigeon domesticating pigeons since the ancient Egyptian times. Uh this is a mosaic from uh an ancient Egyptian building that was excavated. It's in a lot of detail which suggests that probably the Egyptians were quite familiar with pigeons. Um, and the third one, third and final statement. So, give me a yell if you think it's true. The most expensive race racing pigeon ever to be sold was worth £10,000. False. Lovely. Uh, this pigeon is worth 1.3 million. [laughter] Uh there was an auction in 2020 and New Kim uh was sold to a Chinese buyer for uh yeah 1.3 million pounds. Uh uh please let me know anybody if I'm I'm clipping the mic by accident. Apologies. Um yeah, so there is a lot of money in pigeon racing. Uh and racing pigeons tend to be the same kinds of pigeons that you might use to send information. So that was why I just kind of wanted to bring that up. Uh so um pigeons have been used as messengers basically for as long as humans have wanted to send messages. Um there are references to pigeon messages uh messengers in biblical times. We know the Greeks in the 8th century were using pigeons to send the results of the Olympic games down from Mount Olympus. Uh we think Genghaskhan was probably using pigeons to send relay post messages through the empire. Uh and like I say Egyptians also loved a pigeon. Uh the details on the paintings are so good that there's about six species that they actually think they can probably identify quite uh specifically because they were using them so much. Um and to get some idea of why pigeons have been so important to us, I think you have to have a bit of a sense of what they were competing against in the past. Uh so the main reason that we have used pigeons so much is pigeons are quite fast. Uh as I mentioned, so like I say, on average they can travel for around 50 miles an hour. uh better in favorable conditions and they can fly up to 500 miles in a single flight. So if you think about trying to sign send a message from Paris to London for example uh you could do that in about three and a half hours with a pigeon uh which is pretty good uh by comparison it depends how you kind of exactly combine these methods of transport but if you combine feet and horses and boats it's somewhere between 24 hours uh and a couple of weeks. So pigeon has just been sort of technologically one of the better options available to us for a very long time particularly when there's water in the way. So when we talk about the time taken to get a message from London to Paris in this case we are talking about the latency of a pigeon. Uh and that is useful because latency gives us a way of measuring the effectiveness of pigeons as a network and arguably for comparing them to other kinds of uh networks and ways of moving information around. So I was trying to have a bit of a think about how else we might be able to describe and measure a pigeon network. And I came up with these criteria. So we are going to think about the latency, the hardware, the software, the bandwidth and the reliability of a pigeon. Uh so for anybody who is not familiar with these highly technical terms, uh latency is the time between sending and receiving a piece of information by my definition. Uh we've got hardware requirements. So what physical things you need to use a pigeon and the software requirements which for me in this case is the pigeon's brain. We've got bandwidth. So how much information can any one pigeon carry? And we've got reliability. So what are the chances if you send something by pigeon that it will actually get there at the other end. So again using my highly technical framework we are going to say that the latency of a pigeon is okay. [laughter] Sorry I make myself laugh. It's really embarrassing. Um so let's look at hardware. So uh obviously you can't talk about the hardware needs of a pigeon without talking about the great siege of Paris in 1870. Uh so when the we think about this sort of hardware requirement for a pigeon. The difficulty is obviously that pigeons are inherently asymmetric. So pigeons if you using them to send messages can only really go one way. They only have one definition of home. You can kind of take them wherever you want within reason but they'll always deliver the message to the same place. However, there have been times when that's not been a massive issue. And it really does depend what it is you're trying to do. So if you wanted to send an email and you had to ship the routter first, not great. Like I say, the great siege of Paris of 1870. Uh so at this point, for some reason, Paris has been sieged a lot of times, like a startling number of times. Like I say, I'm talking about 1870 here. So it lasted for around 4 months. Uh which is a long time. And I don't want to make light of that. Being in the siege in Paris was awful. It was going into winter. Um to give you some sense of how important uh pigeons might have been, uh it got as far as people were eating animals out of the zoo. Um people were very cold. They were becoming unwell. But still people preserve the pigeons. And the reason for that is because what they managed to do was to use hot air balloons to get information out of Paris. And if you're getting things out of Paris, you can send a pigeon. And so what ended up happening was they were sending uh these hot air balloons outside of Paris stacked up with pigeons which could then be loaded up with information on what was happening in the rest of the world and they would home their way back and bring that information back. So when that first started it was really kind of very important military information. The nature of humans does mean that the minute you're able to send a message, people fill it with gossip. Uh so they reckon that probably around 100,000 messages were sent by pigeons uh over the course of that four months. Uh it got to the point where you could buy a special stamp so that you could send the information back. Uh and they were using microfish and things like that. So they were really finding ways to try and condense as much information as possible onto these pigeons. Um it was quite high stakes. Uh there was I think at least one pigeon handler who overstated the ability of his pigeons. uh and that information did not make it back and it fell into enemy hands. Uh and that person I think was prosecuted. Um but it was really like I say it was really effective in this case. The asymmetry didn't wasn't a problem. Didn't uh work against them. Um people were like I say very familiar very quickly and it was actually such a kind of big part of that uh experience for people that there was eventually a statue made of uh that was in the center of Paris a sort of statue of hot air balloon surrounded by pigeons which unfortunately was later melted down for scrap. Um but I thought it was pretty cool. Uh and yes so in this particular case their abilities were excellent. Thank you. [laughter] Uh but going back to my framework uh I guess the nature of kind of not working in every situation we're going to say it's also okay. Uh so software uh I briefly wanted to talk here about the pigeon brain. I'm not going to get into great detail. I'm not a pigeon scientist or a biologist. Um again I have chatted to my friend who works with birds. Uh and generally it seems like pigeons probably find their way around uh a combination of uh magnetic fields. though potentially iron moving from the liver uh landmarks uh and the position of the sun. It takes about four weeks to teach a pigeon where home is and about 8 to 10 weeks for it to be a fully functional messenger pigeon. So kind of in terms of software development times, not bad. Uh it really only costs bird seed and somewhere to put the pigeon. Um but I guess the reason I also bring this up is because the nature of software is people always want to upgrade it. Uh so I wanted to mention at this point BF Skinner. Um, has anybody heard of BF Skinner before? >> Nice. I love BF Skinner. I'm fascinated by him. I think if you made him as a Dungeons and Dragons character, he'd probably been Artificer. He just made stuff. Anything he could lay his hands on, he made stuff, including something called the air crib, which I do not have time to get into today, but was a fully automated baby crib, and I highly recommend googling it after this talk. Um, but he also made something called the operant conditioning uh box, which also is sometimes referred to as a Skinner box. And he used uh these Skinner boxes with pigeons to demonstrate various behavioral habits. So being able to teach things teach different kinds of animals to respond to a stimulus. Uh he was in the same kind of school of of thinking as people like Pavlov. Um yeah, I would also say actually yeah a lot of what we read about Skinner is about behavioral science, but I actually do think he just wanted more reasons to work with pigeons. Um, so the reason I bring this up because Pitch Skinner really came into his own around World War II. Um, he had a lot of ideas and one of the ones I wanted to mention today was he designed something and started to test it where you could uh actually put three pigeons into the nose cone of a pelican bomb uh and it would be able to steer it. So this thing or the organic uh computer uh was able to potentially be completely human-free uh and the pigeons would peck the screen of a camera obscurer to to keep it on track. Uh he was very disappointed because the military didn't really buy into it. Uh and he said that the real failing here was actually human imagination. Um which I I also support. Um but he could not get the funding to continue it. the missile was never uh tested and eventually the whole department was very quietly uh closed down. But there are some amazing p pictures of people just feeding pigeons into prototypes of missiles which I particularly enjoyed. So I think he did demonstrate that if you are careful about the way that you do it, you could maybe upgrade the software, but you're probably going to have to have some kind of subscription service that's going to keep it up to date and is also often single use in this particular case. Um so for that purpose also software. Okay. Um, bandwidth I'm going to go through fairly quickly. So, bandwidth being how much information a single pigeon can move. Um, and the main thing I'm going to say here is that lots of people have tried lots of things. I'm just going to give you a couple of very brief examples. So, in 2004, three pigeons carried 4 GB of data at a rate equaling 2.2 megabits per second, which in 2004 was not bad. Uh, in 2009, a TV station tested how much information you could send with a pigeon, and it beat a car and an internet connection. Uh, and in 2010, the BBC sent a video from Lincolnshire to Yorkshire. I kind of wanted the joke to be full stop, no mention of pigeons on that last one. Um, weak joke. Um, but that one was a video of a video of the presenter getting his hair cut. And again, uh, it the pigeon did beat the upload to YouTube. YouTube at the time I think the upload rate was quite slow. Uh after four hours it had failed twice I think uh and the pigeon was very safely in Yorkshire. So I think the scalability here is the pigeon is limited again by human uh development in terms of what kinds of uh media it's able to carry up to a sort of weight limit. So we've got bandwidth. Okay. The final one is reliability. Um so how reliable is a pigeon? So, I mean, pigeons have quite a lot of issues even when they're not acting as messengers. But the other thing about that is that they're quite good at dealing with that by themselves. So, one of the most common things is packet loss. The packet being the pigeon and the loss being a hawk. Uh, they do quite often get eaten by hawks. Uh, they can get lost, they can get tired, uh, they can lose things on the way. Um, a lot of what they actually do to survive a lot of these hazards is flocking. So, if you have a big group of pigeons like this, chances are uh it'll be difficult for a predator to sort of lock onto any individual pigeon. So, their odds are better. And if they really feel like something bad is happening, they're quite good at spotting bad news on the horizon. And they will dive. They can move very quickly as we've established. So, they will try and dive out of the way. The third reason that pigeons are often not reliable is once again human error. Uh and to be fair to the pigeons, there's not much they can do about that. And I just very kind of again briefly wanted to touch on uh IP over aven carrier. uh RFC I think 1149 done by by David Whitesman. So in 1990 for April Fool's Day he wrote an RFC describing a pigeon's piece of hardware and I cannot lie I have drawn heavily on it for this talk. Um I just thought it was great uh this sort of description of all the different variables. Um but when I started to dig into it what I liked more was the fact that actually people have tried it. Um, so in 2000, in the early 2000s, the Linux group in Bergen managed to talk some local pigeon fences into working with them and they tested it with six pigeons and it is great. There are loads of photos online. I highly recommend you look them up. Uh, so here is a picture of someone holding a pigeon. Here is also another picture of someone holding a pigeon. Um, but the uh the loss here, the reliability, it was about 55%. But the issue was that people were so excited by having these pigeons that they accidentally let a few of them escape whilst they weren't carrying anything. Uh so out of the six that arrived, only four of them had information, but none of it was the fault of the pigeons. Uh so unfortunately at the moment, it's quite often very difficult to do anything without humans being involved in the process. So human errors does still have to be factored in. Here's another picture. Um I just liked it. Um but for that reason, I'm going to say once again, reliability is okay. Uh, and outside of this framework, like I say, humans do love to innovate. And so there are lots of other examples of what people have done working with pigeons to try and kind of improve what they're able to do. Something to factor in, pigeon doping is now an issue. Uh, if you look at, uh, pigeon racing, like I say at the beginning, there's a lot of money in it. Uh, so for that reason, people are very often trying to make their pigeons be the fastest. Uh, pigeons have really broken through into pop culture. This is a pigeon in Drag Race France. Um, Hatful Boyfriend has worked with pigeons so that they can appear as a human man in order to better find love. Uh, but also Maiden Form. So, Maiden Form is an underwear company and in the war uh in Second World War I, I think uh they also developed harnesses for pigeons so that they could better take part in combat. Uh, and then it's been sort of uh reverted through the years as an example of where they've kind of been very good patriots, etc. Uh, and with the phrase there's a maiden form for every form. Uh, and possibly also to help the pigeons find love. Um, but here is a a picture of a pigeon in a harness attached to a soldier. So, if we were going to try and improve this rating and go from okay on all fronts, uh, I feel like the problem at the moment, I've said that pigeons are brilliant. Uh, but I think it would be fair to say I've made it look like pigeons are distinctly mid. Um, which is a shame and possibly on me. Um, but I have had a little bit of a think of what we could do. So, in order to improve their latency, we could dope the pigeons. to improve their hardware. We could potentially put them in a small aircraft and teach them to fly it, giving them good hardware. I had a long think about how to improve pigeon software and all I could come up with is doping them again. Um, but bandwidth wise, lots of options now. I think you could attach all kinds of storage and particularly if they are flying a light aircraft, that would really open up the possibilities. Uh, increasing the bandwidth to also good and reliability. Like I say, humans are very often the problem. So, I think in this case, I would have the pigeons briefed by other pigeons. I think that would probably solve that one. Uh, and this is where my call to actions, all good talks are, uh, which is add pigeons to EMFX, you cowards. Uh, this is my campaign to add pigeons into the network for 2028. Um, thank you. But obviously, I am joking, but also I'm close to time, so I'm going to keep this brief, but there are always going to be times when analog communication is still really important. And there are still people even today who need pigeons, other equivalent kind of sneaker nets for different reasons. A lot of them are combat, but not only that, people in living in re um people living in rural communities, potentially some other places around the world. Uh and sometimes just because it's nice. Um but I feel like having spent a lot of time writing this talk and talking to people, I think there is prospect here. So I do urge you to put yourself behind this campaign. Um and finally, I know I did promise puns. Um, so I am sorry that there weren't as many as maybe you hoped, but of course there is such thing as too much of a good thing. Thank you very much. [applause]