Pigeon Experiments

Skinner's Pigeons

• Burrhus Frederic Skinner, a psychologist who developed the operant conditioning theory, used pigeons in his studies about behavior. He put under-fed pigeons in a box with a feeder that released food at random times. According to the study, the pigeon thought that whatever it was doing before the feeder gives food was the reason why the food came. For example, if a bird was circling around the cage when the food was released, the bird would continue circling around after eating, hoping that more food would come. Skinner deduced that these pigeons thought they would have some way to control the frequency of food release by repeating an act, even though the release was at random intervals.

Homing Pigeon Experiments

• Scientists believe that a pigeon has three characteristics enabling it to return to its nest or home: the ability to navigate and distinguish landforms, the ability to use its olfactory senses to "smell" directions and the ability to use the Earth's magnetic field and the Sun as a guide. One such study involves scientists at Oxford University claiming that pigeons most often use human transport routes instead of solar or magnetic compasses when flying in human-populated areas. They concluded that this occurs in major cities because the birds often prefer the simplest solution on how to get back home.

Project Sea Hunt

• Jim Simmons, a navy scientist in the 1980s, used pigeons to help rescuers look for survivors in the open sea. Simmons trained the birds to distinguish red and yellow (the color of a lifebuoy and life jacket) and to peck a key once they saw it. The experiment was so successful that the Navy recognized the experiment as the "best daylight search system" during the 1980s; however, because of budget cuts and several drawbacks, the project was abandoned in 1983.

Pigeon vs. Broadband

• In 2009, an IT company based in South Africa pitted a race between a homing pigeon and the broadband connection of the country's largest Internet service provider. The experiment was conducted to find out if a pigeon can deliver four gigabytes of information faster than the broadband service. The pigeon carried a flash drive and was released at the same time the file was sent through a computer.

  The pigeon took about a little more than an hour to reach a destination 50 miles away and a technician transferred the file from the flash drive to a computer that took another hour. Within those two hours, the broadband connection was only able to download four percent of the 4-gigabyte file.