The pigeon draws the most ire among all the birds in the world. But people still love pigeons. Pigeons were used as a messenger and was the sole source of communication. Since the early years, the pigeon was used as a messenger to carry results of sporting events, such as the Olympic Games and football matches, and used as a messenger in wartime. According to studies conducted by researchers, pigeons are known as one of the most intelligent birds. The pigeon can recognize all 26 letters of the English language. Pigeons can make choices by learning to make the appropriate response to a simple kind of stimulus, but also learn not to respond to a different stimulus.
In scientific tests, these birds have been found to be able to differentiate between photographs and even between two different human beings in a photograph. Pigeons are renowned for their outstanding navigational abilities. They use a range of skills, such as using the sun as a guide and an internal ‘magnetic compass’. A study at Oxford University found that pigeons will also use landmarks as signposts and will travel along man-made roads and motorways, even changing direction at junctions. Pigeons have excellent hearing abilities. They can detect sounds at far lower frequencies than humans are able to and can thus hear distant storms and volcanoes. This shows that the pigeons had a representation of what a word is in their brains and that the neural bases of reading, a skill thought to be uniquely human, is also present in animal brains decidedly different from ours.
