The world's first airmail stamps were printed for a pigeon service
Between 1898 and 1908, a pigeon post linking Auckland to Great Barrier Island issued what are considered the world's first airmail stamps. Homing pigeons had carried messages for thousands of years before that, from Ancient Egypt to besieged Paris, and racing birds can cover 1,800 kilometres.
Homing pigeons are a domestic variety of the rock dove, bred to find their way home across huge distances. They inherit a natural homing instinct, returning to the nest partly by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. Often called carrier pigeons, they are distinct from the English carrier, an old fancy breed, though modern homers do carry some of its blood. Over moderate distances of about 965 kilometres they average roughly 97 km/h, and top racers have been clocked at up to 160 km/h over short hops.
Evidence suggests pigeons carried messages in Ancient Egypt by 1350 BCE, and they are said to have announced winners of the ancient Olympic Games. Pliny the Elder wrote of military pigeon messengers around the first century CE. Baghdad used them by 1150, and in 1167 Sultan Nur ad-Din set up a regular service between Baghdad and Syria. Genoa fitted pigeon posts to its Mediterranean watchtowers, and Tipu Sultan of Mysore had birds return to a mosque at his Srirangapatna headquarters, where pigeon holes still pierce the minarets.
Traditionally a pigeon could only fly one way, home, and had to be carried out again for the next message. Trainers later found that keeping food in one place and the loft in another produced reliable shuttles, up to twice a day on round trips of as much as 160 kilometres. That made regular services possible, such as the Great Barrier Pigeongram Service, launched in November 1897 and perhaps the first scheduled airmail anywhere.
In 1860 Paul Reuter, later founder of the Reuters agency, used more than 45 pigeons to carry news and share prices between Brussels and Aachen, where early telegraph lines ended. During the Franco-Prussian War birds ferried mail between besieged Paris and unoccupied France, and in December 1870 one carrying microfilm flew from Perpignan to Brussels in ten hours. Until telephones arrived, such birds were a commercial messaging tool, and in wartime they were known as war pigeons.
Source: Homing pigeon
