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The hallowed history of the carrier pigeon

PARIS— The attractive little Musée de la Poste in the Montparnasse neighborhood has for 20 years been showing objects related to the admirable French postal system — many, many stamps, of course, but also the story of mail delivery through the ages, as well as such objects as the metal pincer that until the mid-19th century held letters from plague-stricken regions while they were disinfected in boiling vinegar.

The museum has recently surged into high drama with a story of unsung heroism and sacrifice: a temporary show called "Pigeon Vole!" (Fly, Pigeon!) dedicated to the carrier pigeon. It is a small, rather summary show because the museum frankly did not realize how interesting the subject was. It will be featured this spring in a television program on the French-German cultural channel Arte.

The first message-bearing pigeon was loosed by Noah. The ancient Romans used pigeons for chariot races, to tell owners how their entries had placed. Genghis Khan established pigeon relay posts across and Asia and much of Eastern Europe. Charlemagne made pigeon-raising the exclusive privilege of nobility. The Rothschild fortune is said to have been seriously augmented by a pigeon bearing news of the British victory at Waterloo. But it was in the Siege of Paris in 1870 that the carrier pigeon won its wings.

As the Prussians advanced, the system of stuffing dispatches into hollow metal balls and floating them down the Seine somehow proved ineffective. But six days after the Siege began on Sept. 19, a balloon called La Ville de Florence sent off three pigeons at 11 a.m. They were back, mission accomplished, by 5 p.m.

When an armistice was declared at the end of January, 409 pigeons had been used and 73 had returned safely, notes the museum display, braving cold, fatigue, Prussian bullets and falcons trained to intercept them.

The grateful nation commissioned Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, of Statue of Liberty fame, to design a bronze monument to honor the balloonists and pigeons of the Siege. Inaugurated in the Place des Ternes in Paris in 1905, it was melted down in World War II.

By World War I, French pigeon lofts were well prepared, as were the those of the other combatants. The Germans even had photographer-pigeons with cameras strapped to their bellies, a system that was only dropped when aerial reconnaissance planes were introduced. By the end of the war France had mobilized 30,000 pigeons and had declared that anyone impeding their flight could be sentenced to death.

The exhibition reports that a brave French pigeon named Le Vaillant was awarded the Ordre de la Nation, but inexplicably it does not mention Cher Ami, the equally heroic American Black Check Cock carrier pigeon. One of 600 birds flown by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Cher Ami saved the lives of the 77th Infantry Division's "lost battalion" at Verdun by delivering 12 messages and returning to his loft with a shattered leg after he was shot. He won the Croix de Guerre with Palm and died in 1919 as a result of his wounds.

By World War II, the French may not have had enough tanks, but they had pigeon units throughout the country. Defeat came too quickly for the pigeons to be of much use, however, except in the Maquis. Pigeons were loosed once again by the French in the Vietnam War.

Pigeons are still used to carry blood samples from remote regions of Britain and France, and in the United States they are able to spot shipwrecks from helicopters because of their 360-degree vision. They are raced (500,000 pigeons cross France each weekend when the weather is good), collected (King Faisal of Saudi Arabia is said to have 150,000) and are subjected to all the vicissitudes of modern life. In eastern India, for example, officials stopped using about 400 carrier pigeons that had served as a link between remote police stations since 1946 because of competition from the Internet and e-mail. And drug traffickers continue to escape technological advances in surveillance by sending flocks of pigeons, each carrying ten grams of heroin, between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Internet mavens even devised a pigeon protocol with the help of Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux computer operating system. It took 1 hour and 42 minutes to transfer a 64-byte packet of information, making the pigeon network about 5 trillion times slower than optical fiber networks, which is hardly a surprise. So why do it? "Because no one had before," was his answer.

If carrier pigeons can lead to silliness and crime, the ordinary Paris pigeon inspires kicks and immense bad will among city dwellers who don't know about Le Vaillant or Cher Ami and only see scruffy gray beasts with overactive digestive systems. The Postal Museum show is clearly an attempt to improve the pigeon's image in Paris, where 40 years ago city authorities decided that 150,000 of them should be deported to the countryside because they had been found to carry lung disease.

Even if they weren't homing pigeons, the deportees tended to return. Contraceptive pills failed, and so did sleeping pills — the pigeons were intended to awaken in the country, but pigeon rights groups claimed that they failed to wake up at all.

Some time ago, although pigeon-feeding had long been declared illegal, an American woman distributed 24 pounds, or 11 kilograms, of grain to pigeons in Paris every day, an activity that had already earned her 19 fines in Nice. A French woman who was seeking quiet on the same bench as the pigeon-feeder started to kick the pigeons, and suffered torn stockings and scratched limbs as a result.

It would have been better, as it turned out, just to move to another bench. Instead the Frenchwoman sued the American woman but lost the case, with the judge ruling that it was her own problem if she didn't know how to kick a pigeon without injuring herself.

In another case, a furniture dealer on Boulevard Voltaire in Paris claimed damages from a woman who fed pigeons from a window ledge a few floors directly above the entrance to his store. It got so bad, the furniture dealer claimed, that his window display was ruined and no one dared enter his store. He went to court. Rather brilliantly, the defendant's lawyer argued that there was no way to prove that the pigeons causing the mess were the ones the neighbor fed. Case lost.

What all this may indicate is that there is little point in fighting pigeons: They are here to stay. And the postal museum, with its tales of carrier-pigeon heroism and the decorative pigeon jewelry on sale in its boutique, is clearly aiming to rehabilitate the ordinary city pigeon as well.

Proof comes with the last exhibit in the show, which has nothing at all to do with carrier pigeons: it shows a "pigeonnier-pilote," or experimental pigeon loft, that has been erected by the city of Paris in the heart of Montparnasse with the aim of "improving relations between citizens and pigeons." The lucky loft-dwellers will be studied by the Museum of Natural History, cared for when ill by the National Veterinary School at Alfort, and given regular check-ups. And they will also, of course, be fed.

The rule against feeding the rest of the pigeon population has not been abrogated but, more subtly, the public is now being advised not to feed pigeons. The birds, reportedly, manage more beneficially on their own.

City pigeons, it is now argued, are necessary for biodiversity. The reason for this is not explained, but biodiversity is a code word these days that means hands off. So pigeons — not only the noble racing pigeon and his luggage-carrying cousin the carrier pigeon, but also common city pigeons — are now a hallowed part of city life.

A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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