Missing pigeons and feathered drones
Racing pigeons vanish en masse... but are birds real?
PIGEON PUZZLE
19 June 2021 has been described by racing pigeon breeders as “one of the very worst racing days in our history”. Nearly 50 races were held across the UK that day, involving over 250,000 birds, but only about 10 per cent of them made it back to their lofts. Sometimes bad weather disrupts races and scatters birds, but 19 June was fine and clear. Initially, each race organiser believed it was just a problem with their particular event, but Welsh pigeon breeder Dene Simpson said: “When we looked on social media, we saw that lots of other federations around the UK had experienced something similar.” Over the following days a few stragglers limped home, while other birds turned up as far afield as Holland and Majorca, but most seem to have vanished completely.
The problem was not confined to Britain: racers across Europe reported that their birds too had vanished in large numbers. Pigeon racers remain mystified as to the cause of this chaos, but as homing pigeons rely on the Earth’s magnetic field for navigation, they suspect some kind of solar storm or other event that disrupted the magnetic field may have confused the birds and led them astray. Records of solar and geomagnetic activity for the day show that there were low levels of solar activity and no disruptions to the Earth’s magnetic field – so whatever it was wrecked the birds’ navigation, it wasn’t these. Coasttocoastam.com, 29 June; spaceref.com, 20 June 2021
Research on the proteins in birds’ eyes has shown that they use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate by exploiting quantum physics. The research looked at a protein called Cryptochrome 4 (CRY4) which was known to play a role in birds’ magnetic sense. Using CRY4 from the retinas of European robins, scientists showed that the protein was magnetically sensitive, with any blue light hitting it setting off a cascade of reactions that produce two lone electrons that act like magnets due to a quantum property of electrons known as “spin”. These are then affected by the Earth’s magnetic field. While the research identified the mechanism by which CRY4 can detect a magnetic field, it is not yet known how this is sensed by the bird. Sciencenews.org, 28 June 2021.
BIRDS AREN’T REAL
A lot of this could be explained by the “Birds Aren’t Real” conspiracy that contends that all birds in the United States have been killed and swapped with drones operated by the federal government, and that this has been going on since the 1950s. “I think the evidence is all around us, birds sit on power lines, we believe they’re charging on power lines, we believe that bird poop on cars is liquid tracking apparatus,” said movement leader Peter McIndoe. The organisation, which has been alerting the public at protests, social media, and on a SubReddit with nearly 400,000 members, is now taking a rally on the road round the US to get the message across, dubbing the secret “Poultrygate”.
McIndoe started the movement when a student at the University of Memphis in Tennessee in 2017 by holding up a sign at the local Women’s March reading, “Birds are a myth; they’re an illusion; they’re a lie. Wake up America! Wake up!” Pictures of this went viral and a movement was born.
The Audubon Society, the leading bird conservation organisation in the US, says that while the campaign is political satire to many of its followers, to others, it is “no more unbelievable than QAnon.” BoingBoing.net 25 June; thehill.com, 28 June 2021.