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Comment by kibae | Hacker News Reader

Pigeons were used in WW1 and WW2 for communication. Paddy the pigeon [0] flew 230 miles across the English channel to relay the success of the D-Day invasion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_(pigeon)

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I've known about pigeons being used for communications and even bottle-nose dolphins being used for clearing mines in WW2. But I'm just curious if they've ever attempted to use crows for reconnaissance or early warning systems. Especially for use at something like forward operating bases that are always prone to enemy ambushes. Or maybe even using crows to alert of enemy movements.

I watched a video earlier today on a YT channel I follow called Curious Droid. This episode went into how the U.S military had a hard time determining vietcong troop movements due to the thick jungle foilege. So DARPA developed this concept of electronic fenses, where the airforce would drop these sensor packages into the jungle. The package would have sesmic sensors and microphones to capture movement of enemy forces through the jungle. The problem was that this being the 1960s/70s - the batteries only lasted couple of weeks. Also data storage and tranmission rates weren't advance enough at the time to send that information to a centralize location far from the contested area. So they had to have an aircraft loitering above to collect this data and then fly the collected data to a processing facility in Thailand. By the time the data was classified and analyized, the intelligence collected wasn't really actionable for the commanders in the field.

Here is the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feDk6oaeVAY

I find it fascinating how scientists still haven't definitively figured out how magnetoreception in birds works. Humans have utilized homing pigeons for thousands of years [1], but it is still a mystery as to how it works. To quote a paper from 2019 [2]:

> Yet in spite of considerable progress in recent years, many details are still unclear, among them details of the radical pair processes and their transformation into a nervous signal, the precise location of the magnetite-based receptors and the centres in the brain where magnetic information is combined with other navigational information for the navigational processes.

1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-egypt-pigeon-p...

2. https://doi.org/10.1098%2Frsif.2019.0295

I thought I read that they had detected something in the birds' eyes.

Hilariously, during WW2 there was also a research project to build guided missiles using pigeons in the nose cone. "The nose cone of the missile would be split into three compartments, with a lens projecting an image of the intended target onto a screen at the front. A pigeon in each compartment, trained by operant conditioning to recognise the target, would peck at it continually."

https://www.military-history.org/feature/pigeon-guided-missi...

Worms still use them as homing missiles for their Armageddon battles

Hi! What planet are you from?

And “almost” as guide systems for bombs! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

Didn't they have wireless communication? What benefits did the pigeons have?

Harder to intercept?

You'd want to encrypt your communication in either case.

Triangulation of the sender (or the receiver by way of emissions of the receiving set) was a problem in WWII. There's also the problem of traffic analysis. I would think birds would be immune to both.

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