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)

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

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?

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.

This is a bit in a Chris Morris movie called Four Lions.

Barry says we come out blurry

They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing - if you could train them to spot and snatch coins and bills.

I suspect they would be difficult to train, because of their attitude. We see this with many wild animals. Dogs train easily, but coyotes and wolves, who are even smarter, are much more difficult to train.

One of my favorite nature vignettes, is a part of Planet Earth, by the BBC, about Cape Hunting Dogs[0]. It looks like a military assault. They are really clever, and work well, as a team.

But if you could train crows, they would probably be marvelous.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MRS4XrKRFMA

Train is a bit of a shorthand here, though. Basic operant conditioning probably won't cut it. But the idea itself came to me after encountering similar thread about crows on HN many years ago - both comments and referenced articles would contain personal anecdotes about human-crow relationships, and from those I gathered that it's possible to kind of befriend a crow (or a group), and teach them behaviors as a kind of play.

So, I don't expect it's easy to train crows like dogs and pigeons, where one person "pre-trains" them and gives/sells them to someone else. But I think it should be possible to "train" a crow for yourself - bond with it and have it voluntarily indulge you reliably enough that it's pretty much like training.

It’s interesting how our view of animal intelligence is massively shaped by the animals we see every day - pets, farm animals, zoo animals. All animals that have had their natural intelligence degraded substantially.

Badgers are incredibly smart and we seem to not be able to train them at all. There's a pair on YouTube that figure out how to escape their sanctuary

Honey badgers? I visited a place in Africa where a pair were housed in an old tile-sided swimming pool because they could get through anything else. Until someone left a long-handled garden tool in there and they used it to climb out. One of the two was never seen again. The other was caught in a lion enclosure - it had cornered of the lions who was trying to avoid a fight, allegedly.

A classic Honey Badger Meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg

Dogs are wolves. All of them.

The inevitable result: https://cmarshall.com/images/WhatsTheWorst.jpg

Thinking about markers, the falconer at a railway station I frequent paints the pigeons he wants his bird to pursue with a green laser.

> They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing

for that literal reason, they are illegal to keep as pets in srilanka

ISTR a study where someone tried to train crows to collect litter in return for small food treats. It worked fine until the crows discovered some old pizza and decided it was better than the study's rewards.

Such a human move. Learn something remarkable about nature, next step then is thinking about how to use it for warfare.