I’ve had a slight obession with them recently, is it possible?
Here in the Netherlands the “pigeon racing” sport is still relatively alive, but does have an aging target group. Pigeons are driven somewhere many miles anyway, (well km’s) and released, first home gets a price.
There are breeders and trainers etc.
if you’re really interested in pigeon behavior Rowan university in New Jersey has a pigeon lab for studying avian communication and cognition
Well, I’m in Ireland, but thanks anyway!
So you definitely can’t go there easily but Gerald Hough is who does a lot of research on the abilities of homing pigeons and is available via email if you had specific questions
https://csm.rowan.edu/departments/psychology/research/aviancognition.html
Is his bio and email
Send him a pigeon, duh!
So yes, they are still possible to train and use, are in active use (for example in photography for rafting), and there are RFC standards relating to internet over carrier pigeon. Also, they are actually favourable compared with ADSL so yeah, a legitimate possible option for some cases.
There’s a homing pigeon club not far from where I live.
I once went down a rabbit hole looking at falconry. In my state its heavy regulated, it’s probably the same with pigeons.
I don’t think that’s correct. Most raptors are, I believe, regulated due to their conservation status. E.g., AFAIK, the only people that can legally kill raptors are people that belong to certain Native American tribes; simple possession of things like hawk feathers that you picked up from roadkill can be a felony.
Pigeons in general aren’t really at any kind of conservation risk
I don’t doubt you’re right nobody cares about the lowly pigeon, in fact some cities encourage nesting of raptors to keep their population in check. I do doubt any protected birds are allowed to be kept. Hawks are very common where I live, seeing a red tail or cooper’s hawk is a daily occurance where I live so I assume the regulations are for humane treatment rather than preservation. My friend and his son came across a dead bald eagle while hiking and they kept it as they had a large skull collection. I looked it up and as you said it’s against the law with very steep penalties so I advised him to make sure his son kept his mouth shut in school.
I was walking in the neighborhood recently and passed a guy putting a pigeon in a high up box in his yard. It was such a an odd thing that I wasn’t sure what was going on, and mentioned to my daughter that I thought this guy was keeping pigeons, and she said “because you saw him KEEPING PIGEONS?” Which I guess is fair, it just was so weird I wasn’t sure!
I don’t know if he uses them to send messages, but some people certainly have them at least as pets.
No. They’re extinct.
Do you mean passenger pigeon?
