Birds in the picture

[Fredfredson]

Birds in the picture

Pigeons get down to business, ferrying rafting company photos
By Katy Human
The Denver Post
Posted: 06/24/2007 02:06:52 AM MDT
Updated: 06/24/2007 02:08:18 AM MDT

Charlie Malone, 27, waits to snap pictures of the next group of rafters for Rocky Mountain Adventures, which uses pigeons to carry digital-photo memory sticks to headquarters before their clients arrive back. (Special to the Post / Nathan W. Armes)





Fort Collins - A tourist-filled raft slammed into the Class 3 rapid Sarah's Hole on the Cache la Poudre River one morning this week.


Some rafters grimaced, others screamed or laughed as they punched through the waves. Their faces were captured by photographer Charlie Malone.


When Malone was done shooting, he pulled the memory stick out of his Nikon camera and slipped it into a tiny Lycra backpack worn by a gray pigeon named Lucky.


Malone gently released the bird riverside, and Lucky took wing.


Malone and the company he works for, Rocky Mountain Adventures, were relying on the uncanny - and scientifically mysterious - ability of homing pigeons to fly for tens and even hundreds of miles and find their way home.
Lucky, a training messenger pigeon, rests on a branch after being sent down the valley with his digital memory cargo that is contained in the small black back pack. (Special to the Post / Nathan W. Armes)




No one knows how they do it, said pigeon expert Charles Wolcott, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.


Wolcott believes pigeons rely on "multiple, redundant systems" to navigate accurately - using vision, smell and even the Earth's magnetic field to orient.


Researchers have covered pigeons' eyes or capped them with magnetically active hats to try to disorient the birds. Still, they locate their home base more often than not.


"It's like wearing belts and suspenders - you can disable any one thing, and they still find their way home," Wolcott said.


Dave Costlow, owner of Rocky Mountain Adventures, estimated that last year, 91 percent of the time, his pigeons delivered film or memory sticks fast enough to print and display rafting pictures before clients, still dripping from their ride, walked back into the store.


They get more and more reliable as the season goes by, Malone said.


"I've had people watch me release the birds, and they still don't believe me," Malone said. "They think it's a stunt."


So while other rafting companies race their film back by car or kayak, Rocky Mountain
Rafters, Fred and Shirley Kremer, from Holland, pick out photos from their white water adventure June 21. (Special to the Post / Nathan W. Armes)


takes it on the wing. He is, Costlow said, the only one that does it that way.

"We may not increase our profits because of the attraction of the birds themselves," Costlow said, "but we do increase our profits by having our photos ready."


The pigeons, which fly about 60 mph, make that possible. Most of the time.


This year's rafting and pigeon-training seasons began late, slowed by a chilly spring. Costlow's 16 birds still haven't completely adjusted to their work, he said.


Lucky flew just 15 feet from Malone's hands and landed on a pine branch.


"Go, Lucky! You're the one with the film today," the 27-year-old Malone called.


The bird looked calmly down at the photographer and then gazed across the river.


Three of her nest mates - released with her for company - were soaring in wide, high circles, gaining altitude and their bearings before heading back down the canyon.
Lucky stayed put.


"Come on, Lucky," Malone urged. He needed to get back in his car to shoot pictures of another rafting group on a longer trip upstream.


During homing-pigeon races, birds may fly hundreds of miles in a day, and they almost always make it, Cornell's Wolcott said.


"And then there are these strange occasions - called smashes - where for reasons unknown, you'll let 20,000 go and three appear at the home loft," Wolcott said. "We don't know why."
This day, Lucky wasn't racing - or even in a hurry.


At about noon, back in Fort Collins, the morning's soggy rafters returned to the Rocky Mountain Adventures store.


The photos of the rafters and flailing paddles were there, thanks to a backup driver and car.
Lucky arrived later.


"It's early in the season," Costlow said. "They'll get better."
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.

[Sir Digalot]

hahah reminds me of RFC 1149

[Zan de Man]

I was in the Welsh Marches for most of the day. I could've used a carrier pigeon.

[Fredfredson]

Check this out

SA's Largest Telecomms Provider vs. a PigeonComments:120



Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 08, @10:56AM
from the may-the-best-bird-win dept.
dagwud writes "Just a few days after this Slashdot article, South Africa's largest telecoms provider, Telkom (which has been taking flak for years for its shoddy and overpriced service), is being pitted against a homing pigeon to see which can deliver 4GB of call centre data logs quickest over a distance of around 80km (50 miles). According to the official website, the race is set to take place September 10."


P.S. The pigeon's name is "Winston"

[Sir Digalot]

Winston has a facebook page...

[CatWoman]

Pidgeons are rats with wings.

[VanishingPoint]

Originally Posted by CatWoman

Pidgeons are rats with wings.

That is what I thought about Seagulls. You can always tell the tourist from the locals on the beaches because tourist feed the Seagulls.

[Fredfredson]

Winston beat the ADSL hands (wings) down!


SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'



Winston the pigeon was allowed no "performance-enhancing seeds"

Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.

He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper.

'No cats allowed'

Winston took off from Unlimited IT's call centre in the town of Howick to deliver the memory stick to the firm's office in Durban.

According to Winston's website there were strict rules in place to ensure he had no unfair advantage.


Kevin Rolfe with Winston
Winston is over the moon
Kevin Rolfe

East Africa gets high-speed web

They included "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within".

The firm said Winston took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices, and the data took another hour to upload on to their system.

Mr Rolfe said the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete in the same time.

Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

"Winston is over the moon," Mr Rolfe said.

"He is happy to be back at the office and is now just chilling with his friends."

Meanwhile Telkom said it could not be blamed for slow broadband services at the Durban-based company.

"Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted," Telkom's Troy Hector told South Africa's Sapa news agency in an e-mail.

South Africa is one of the countries hoping to benefit from three new fibre optic cables being laid around the African continent to improve internet connections.

[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by VanishingPoint

You can always tell the tourist from the locals on the beaches because tourist feed the Seagulls.

Around here we tell the tourists from the locals because the tourists are the ones that go out into the sun on purpose.

[VanishingPoint]

Originally Posted by Tom Joad

Around here we tell the tourists from the locals because the tourists are the ones that go out into the sun on purpose.

We get a lot of fog, not as much sun.