When you want to send a message to someone these days, all it takes is a few swipes of your finger on a smartphone. For thousands of years before the advent of instantaneous communication and the Internet,communication had to be done in much slower ways.

Writing letters and having them hand-delivered was probably the most basic and long-standing means of communication, but some people wanted to remove the human element entirely. Just as we now rely on wireless networks and microchips to do our heavy lifting, earlier generations used homing pigeons to deliver their messages across long distances. In movies and television, we have all seen homing pigeons (or ravens) delivering messages, but what is the story behind this bizarre ability?

While delivering messages on horseback or on foot was satisfactory, it also came with a lot of unpredictable variables. More than 3,000 years ago, the first such improvement on message delivery was made. when homing pigeons were first introduced. While studying the patterns and movements of birds,it appeared that they even after foraging, hunting and soaring for miles in every direction, they were able to guide themselves home.

Pigeons tend to be easy to get,quick to breed, and highly “in tune ”with their sense of direction. In particular rock pigeons were chosen and interbred to create homing pigeons,essentially birds that could find their way home. These pigeons would be trained very carefully, gradually being taken further and further from its “nest”before being released and flying home. In this way, pigeons could be programmed to fly home from a range of different locations. Pigeons could use visual cues, like natural landmarks, and gradually develop a known path back to its home base,

Unfortunately, this meant manually transporting large amounts of pigeons in one direction, before having them released with a message attached to their leg, hoping that they would return to the original location.

These messages were typically small rolls of parchment or paper, stored in a small glass or metal tube. Once the message was written and stored, the homing pigeon would be released to fly home, thus delivering the message on time and skipping over traffic,natural, disasters, divulging, dishonesty, and human error.

Now, rock pigeons were particularly gifted in this homing ability due to their strong magnetoreception skills. For those of you who don't know magnetoreception is an innate ability in certain life forms to defect and orient themselves based on magnetic fields.

Rock pigeons that showed the strongest ability were bred to create powerful and reliable homing pigeons!Interestingly enough it has been found that homing pigeons are much more accurate going long distances in the north and south direction ,rather than east and west,due to the natural diree-tion of the magnetic fields( flowing between the North Pole and South Pole).