WHY WOULD PIGEONS, AND NOT OWLS, MAKE A WIZARD’S BEST FRIEND?

They ghost through the air on shadowy, moonlit nights. They make their muffled way through the dark skies on their way to and from the Owlery at Hogwarts Castle. And they glide on nameless winds, their melancholy cries the only hint that they carry messages for wizard kind.

Owls are as abundant in nature as they are in the magic world of the Harry Potter series. Owls are found across the planet, with over 200 species of this mostly solitary bird. Nocturnal birds of prey, owls are typically upright in posture, with binocular vision, and feathers evolved for silent flight. Rarely do they appear in the day.

The Eurasian eagle-owl, such as that sported by the Malfoys, has a wingspan of nearly two meters, and can eat foxes, herons, and even small dogs. So at least some owls are large and strong enough to carry parcels. Though they are certainly clever enough, owls have never been used to deliver messages.

Humans have held owls in high regard since before the beginning of civilization. The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche department of southern France contains, among its wonderful display of figurative paintings, the clear image of an owl, engraved into the rock. The owl is shown on the cave wall with its head seen from the front, but its body seen from the back. Little wonder that even pre-historic cultures associated owls with supernatural powers. Early humans may also have been fascinated by the owl’s other inhuman ability to see in the dark, such as the cave itself. The Chauvet cave owl painting is thought by scholars to be at least 30,000 years old. It’s a long pedigree in magic.

Though owls are as yet unused by muggles as messengers, nature provides some stunning alternatives.

Arctic Terns

The bird with the most spectacular stamina is the Arctic tern. This seabird is mightily migratory. It sees not one, but two summers each year, as it migrates along a route from the Arctic north to the Antarctic coast for the southern summer, only to follow the same path once more, six months later. Recent muggle studies suggest an annual round-trip of around 44,000 miles for terns nesting in Iceland, and an incredible 56,000 miles for terns nesting in the Netherlands.

Arctic terns are by far the longest migratory creatures in the entire animal kingdom. Not only that, but the Arctic tern is a long-lived bird. Many reach fifteen to thirty years of age, in some cases outliving many wild owls. The species is also abundant, with an estimated population of one million birds across the globe.

But the Arctic tern is also unproven as a message carrier. The most distinguished pedigree as nature’s dispatch rider must surely go to the common columbine.

Using the Columbine

Consider the candidacy of the humble pigeon. Pigeons, along with doves, belong to the bird family, Columbidae. The family includes over 300 species, and is probably the most common bird in the world. The species to which we refer most as ‘pigeon’ is the rock dove. Pigeon flights as long as 1,000 miles have been recorded, and their average flying speed is about the speed of a car. Pigeons have a long history with humans as carriers. The Egyptians and the Persians first used them to carry messages, around 3,000 years ago, the Republic of Genoa set up a system of pigeon watchtowers that ran along the Mediterranean Sea.

But how do pigeons know where to fly? Nobody knows for sure. Every seemingly reasonable hypothesis has been tested to destruction. Some muggle studies suggested ‘magneto-perception’—that pigeons have a kind of map and compass in their heads. This perception means they sometimes use the sun to work out where they’re going and, since the Earth is like a big magnet, they may also use the Earth’s magnetic field to get them home. When they get close to where they’re going, the theory supposes, they also use landmarks.

Believing that the pigeon perception was magnetic, muggles used pigeons as messengers in World War II. Pigeons were routinely taken on Lancaster bombers, and together the birds contributed to the war effort as the British Royal Air Force Pigeon Corps. The idea was that if the pigeons were ditched in the North Sea, on the way back from an aerial sortie over Germany, the flight navigator would tie a map reference of where the plane last was to the leg of the pigeon, in case radio contact was broken. These pigeons saved thousands of lives.

War Heroes

But were the pigeons using magnetism and landmarks? Some were released in the middle of the night in freezing fog, 100 miles from land, with no landmarks in sight, and they still got home. The most outstanding of the pigeons were awarded medals by the British. The meritorious performance list has about 500 examples of such astonishing feats. They were literally dropped out of planes in the middle of nowhere, often during cold winter nights, but still got home the next morning.

To get to the bottom of pigeon perception, muggles went to work. They blocked the pigeon’s nostrils up with wax. Turpentine was placed on their beaks to disorient their sense of smell because they figured the mysterious sense of the birds might be olfactory. They even severed the olfactory nerves of the pigeons, in some dubious experiments.

But the muggles were undeterred by their lack of success. They strapped magnets to the birds’ wings. They even wound Helmholtz magnetic coils about the pigeons’ heads. Even when the muggles fitted the birds’ vision with frosted glass contact lenses, and released them over 200 miles away from home, they still flocked down within a quarter of a mile of the loft!

Even if the pigeons are released on cloudy days, or if their internal clocks have been shifted 6 hours, or 12 hours, by keeping them under artificial day-lengths for weeks, they still come home.

Every one of these muggle experiments aimed to test whether the pigeons work via an internal compass or by recognizing and using landmarks on the ground below. One muggle experiment even anaesthetized the pigeons and placed them in rotating drums in an effort to throw their sense of direction. Still, on release, they flew straight home.

Home Ties

For over one hundred years, pigeons have remained something of a mystery. Charles Darwin had suggested in 1873 in a paper on the origin of instincts in Nature, that pigeons might commit to memory their journey out, and somehow repeat it on the way home. All evidence to date suggests the means by which the pigeon navigates remains a mystery. Yet, there seems to be some unknown form of connection between the pigeon and its home.

As almost all previous experiments involved moving the pigeons from their home, a new set of experiments moved their home instead using a mobile pigeon loft. Once more, there’s a history here, as the British Pigeon Corps employed mobile lofts behind the front lines in World War I. Like the Night Bus in the magical world, the mobile pigeon lofts were fashioned out of London buses, converted especially for the purpose.

When the lofts were first moved, just a half a mile away, the pigeons seemed totally confused. Though they could see the slightly moved loft, they encircled the area, flying about the place where the loft used to be, for several hours. Just as anyone would be confused, if they’d found their home had been moved 100 yards down the street, while they were away. Eventually, the bravest of the birds would try out the new loft location by simply diving in. After the loft had been moved several times, the rest of the pigeons returned home.

The secret of the pigeon’s long and prestigious pedigree remains a mystery. It would seem the perfect bird for the wizarding world. Making their way with the latest wizard word, come hell or high-water, from home to Diagon Alley, and to a huge Hogwarts Loft in the Castle’s West Tower.