Columba Livia Works If The Message Has a Subject

Neil Armstrong:

"The eagle ‘clasps the crag with crooked hands;/Close to the sun in lonely lands’. The nightingale, that ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’, sings ‘of summer in full-throated ease’. The skylark ‘from the earth … springest/Like a cloud of fire’.

The pigeon? Well, the great poets have generally been less inspired by the humble pigeon (Columba livia). Its song is not a mellifluous cascade of liquid notes. It does not fall like a thunderbolt from the sky. It is not rare or endangered – exactly the opposite – and familiarity has bred contempt.

But it does have a ‘superpower’, as Gordon Corera terms it: an innate homing ability. Selective breeding has produced birds that can be taken hundreds of miles from their nests or lofts, even to another country, and then unerringly return home. This ability, still poorly understood by science, was harnessed in the extraordinary Second World War cloak-and-dagger operation that is the subject of Corera’s fascinating book...."

(review of 'Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe' by Gordon Corera, 2018 for  Literary Review)

Artist: Will McPhai, The New Yorker, January 2016

“You know I hate when you check your messages at the table.”  

Artist: Benjamin Schwartz, The New Yorker, August 2015