How To Train A Homing Pigeon

How To Train A Homing Pigeon

Pigeons are animals. Let's start with the basics.

Life. They are alive. Not "dead" like stones, gases or liquids.

Archea. They came from single cells.

Multicellular eukarote are metazoa or animalia organisms, they're motile (they move), and they're heterotrophs (they ingest other organisms)..

Phylum cordata they are animals with vertibrae or close related. As embryos they have a notochord (a tiny spine), a dorsal nerve cord (becomes the spinal cord), an endostyle (a groove that's on the ventral wall of the pharynx which produces mucus to gather food particles) and a post-anal tail.

Subphylum vertebrata They have a backbone and spinal column

Class - Aves. They are birds. They are winged, bipedal, endothermic (warm-blooded), egg-laying, vertebrate animals. The earliest known bird is the archaeopteryx (meaning Ancient Wing), which was around during the Jurassic period. It was like a magpie but about half a metre long. It lived in Germany.

Birds have no teeth, a four-chambered heart and wings. Most birds fly. Ones that don't include penguins, chickens, and the New Zealand Moa - now sadly extinct. They were 12ft Ostriches and died out around 1500 AD.

The smallest bird is the Bee Hummingbird. It's about 5 centimetres or 2 inches long. Nowadays the biggest bird is the 9ft ostrich. The biggest ever bird, however, was the Elephant Bird from Madagascar. It's scientific name was the Aepyornis Maximus, and was about 1/4 of the size of a T-Rex.

Birds are social monogamous - meaning for one breeding season at a time, or up to several years, they pick a single partner but rarely for life. Birds that do mate for life include swans, geese, eagles and some owls. But don't worry, if their partner dies, they grieve but move on and find a new partner eventually to stop them from being lonely. A few birds are also polygymous (have many females) or polyandrous (have many male mates).

There are a few theories about how flight started:

• Cursorial (from the ground up) - The early birds were running along with their wings out, trying to keep their balance, the feather grew naturally for warmth and speed and eventually they picked up enough lift to keep going into the sky.
• Arboreal - From the trees down. They were up in the trees and jumping down, and the feathers and wings helped with landing. Then, they threw themselves at the ground and missed. 
• WAIR - Wing Assisted Incline Running. So, right, they were running up a hill, and then the hill ran out and they kept running and just lept into the air and kept running into the sky until they were flying.

Family - Columbidae. Pigeons are the Columbidae family along with Doves, within the order Columbiformes - meaning they are monogamous and can suck up water without tilting their head back.

Dodos are also Columbiformes.

Migration

Bird populations migrate along a flyway. There are 11 major ones. Highlights include:

• Atlantic - Connects the Appalachians to Jamacia via the West Coast of the US.
• Central American - Down from central Canada to the tip of South America
• Pacific - From Alaska to Patagonia
• East Atlantic - Greenland, West Europe, curling around to the East to Southern Africa
• Central Asian - from the top West of Russia, straight down to Iraq and Yemen, then veers off toward Sri Lanka.
• East Asian - Zig-zags from Australia to Russia, then New Zealand and screws back to Japan. 

The primary motivation for migration is food, but high stress, physical exertion and predation dog them the whole way. Migration was not accepted universally as a theory until at least 1878. Until this time everyone thought swallows hibernated as they couldn't explain why they just suddenly disappeared.

They know when to go due to the timing of the day length. Even captive birds fly in migration directions before returning to their cages.

They navigate by the sun and the moon and use them as a compass. They automatically correct their direction based on the time of day or night. They also use magnetoception. There are a lot of nerves in the upper beak which contains biological magnetite - the most magnetic of all naturally occuring minerals on Earth. Magnetite is also found in the brains of bees, termites and fish. And in the same place (behind the nose) in humans.

The chiton - a mollusc also called a "sea cradle" - which looks like a giant tongue has teeth made of magnetite.

Magnetite is an iron oxide with the chemical formula Fe3O4 or FeO-Fe2O3. It's brittle, black, twice as hard as chalk and half as hard as diamond in large quantities.

Also, in the eyes of pigeons there are photoreceptor cells. Inside there is a light-sensitive molecule called cryptochrome which when in contact with blue light splits into two molecules each with a spare electron. The spinning of these electrons is affected by magnetic fields which in turn affects the light sensitivity of the retinal nerons (like a tiny brain in the eye) which enables the bird to "see" or rather "visually sense" the magnetic field.

With humans, this sense is in the nose, and studies have proved that it is affected by large magnets. Some people find their magnetoception is improved by having magnetic implants under their skin.

Birds use this sense to navigate both globally and locally.

How to Train A Homing Pigeon

And now on to the climax. To find a good homing pigeon:

• Examine the feathers, they should be smooth, slippery and full of natural powder. 
• The feet should be white and full of powder - the whiter the legs the healthier the pigeon.
• The pigeon's pectoral muscles should be strong. If they are weak the tail sticks up at the back and will be dented. Healthy pigeons have straight tails.
• Other muscles should be firm and streamlined. If they're too bony it means it has poor stamina and will be a slow flier. 
• Gaps in the wing feathers mean poor flying. A strong pigeon will try to stop you looking at its feathers. 
• Check for pararsites, mites and feather lice. 
• Start with young birds.
• Create a fly pen so they can fly but not escape. Feed them in their loft so they know to go there for food.
• Start to let the pigeons fly outside the pen. They WILL go crazy at first, flying around or diving to the floor. 
• After a few days they'll start going off in a flock and coming back together for about an hour at a time. 
• At this point take pigeons out 5-10 miles and let them fly home.
• Every time they omplete a distance 3 times, make it further away. 
• Work your way up to about 50 miles as that's their limit. Although they have been known o do up to 200 miles.
• Train once a week, changing the direction from the loft and the direction of release.
• In winter only release them on clear good days.
• Keep them hungry before a flight so they have something to return to.

Facts

Thirty-two pigeons have been decorated with military honours for war contributions, including GI Joe, Paddy, Commando and William of Orange.

Pigeon is the cheap option for sacrifice if you can't afford a more expensive animal according to the Jewish Tanakh. They're also the only birds you're allowed to use for a korban sacrifice.

Pigeon breast is very tasty and kosher.

Don't get too carried away as 19% of all species of pigeon are endangered.

How To Fire A Cannon Correctly

How To Fire A Cannon Correctly
As suggested by Amy Brewer, a cannon lover from London Town, student and business manager in Edinburgh. She shares her birthday with both her parents and she's an only child.

A cannon is a piece of artillery that fires a projectile. usually using gunpowder and sometimes other types of propellant.

Being a type of artillery, this originally meant, "any infantry armed with projectile weapons," but the term has changed to refer to, "engines of war" that operate by projectile of munitions beyond the range of effect of personal weapons.

Engines of war - although sounding modernist or futurist (they being obsessed with the production of machines to do things for humans - baking, manufacturing, killing), they have operated since antiquity. Machines of war have been used to break or circumnavigate city walls or fortifications in siege warfare.

It all started with battering rams and catapults or siege towers. The biggest being Demetrius Poliorcetes' Helepolis (lit. the Taker of Cities). Nine stories high (as big as ten double deckers stacked one on top of each other) and iron plated, it weighed 180 tonnes - requiring 3500 men to operate it. Demetrius was King of Macedon in 294 BC. He also made a battering ram 180 feet long - longer than a football pitch and taking 1,000 men to operate. Neither worked.

An early form of cannon is of course a cross bow - one of the earliest being the Gastraphetes in 285 BC. These were soon accompanied by oxybelles - giant cross bows that fire giant spikes.

Later on came gun powder - its first recorded use on January 28th 1132 - a Thursday (Jan 28th is also the birthday of Ronnie Scott, Acker Bilk, Robert Wyatt, Nicolas Sarkozy and Elijah Wood). On this Thursday General Han Shizhong of the Song Dynasty used it against the city of Fujian. He won.

It caught on in Europe big time during the Hundred Years War (actually 116 years) (actually 7 wears - the Edwardian War, Caroline War, Lancastrian war, Breton war of succession, Castilian Civil War, the catchily named 1383-1385 war and the War of Two Peters).

In case you were wondering the two Peters were -of Castille and -of Aragon. They were fighting over Castille and fighting over Aragon. They both wanted each other's crown. Castille won, but both Peters ended up looking like a couple of Dicks.

Anyway, during the (false) 100 Year War, cannons got powerful enough to - get this - Knock Down Roofs. Up until 1430 most cannons were static, unweildy and inaccurate. They were mainly used for defence. In fact Joan of Arc came a cropper against them here on British soil.

Cannons, or bombards as they're currently known in this period are muzzle loaded tubes that fire stone or metal balls. Or just any old rubbish lying around. Bombard is from the French form of a Greek word meaning a humming noise.

Some notable examples from the time period include the improbably named Mons Meg - 4 metres long and fired cannon balls half a metre in diameter. Or the more improbably named Philip The Good. There's the Pumhart von Steyr (Steyr by name, slayr by nature) - an 8 tonne, 2.5 metre party popper - shaped exactly like the irritating festive decoration. It fired 700kg, 80cm balls.  Then there's Mad Meg, Lazy Mette, Lazy Grette and the Grose Bosche, which in German means Big Gun. How very German indeed.

These were the Superguns - flinging their huge big balls around and extremely dangerous to know. The balls were bigger than 50 centimetres in diameter and took so much powder to fire they'd often simply explode on the spot and kill the irreplacable gun crew. Sometimes they even took out their own Kings - as James II - a big advocate what would nowadays be the NRA - found out when on the 31st August 1460 (a Friday) his cannon exploded and killed him.

Cannons got smallers and lighter and were used on both sides of the war and as the 15th Century dawns the word "cannon" passes frequently into use.

The world cannon is from the Italian "Cannone" meaning "Large Tube" (calm it, you at the back). The plural, "cannons" is a recent Americanism, where before the plural of a cannon was cannon.

So now we get to the crux of the subject - How To Fire A Cannon Correctly.

Firstly, for muzzle-loading cannons

1. If just fired you'd cover the air vent to choke the barrel and suffocate any sparks
2. Insert a damp sponge to swab the barrel and clear out hot debris. This might seem like a waste of time but in a REAL WAR SITUATION its necessary and improves accuracy.
3. Insert the priming charge after removing it from its paper bag. If your cannon has a flash pan - fill that first. Then the propellant charge goes in.
4. Ram the charge into place using a ramrod. 
5. Add wadding and ramrod to hold the charge in place.
6. Add the projectile.
7. Use more wadding and ramrodding to hold the projectile in place, this also creates a seal to prevent gaseous escape.
8. Insert priming fire or fuse after removing the air vent cover.
9. Aim cannon taking into account distance, trajectory, slant range, inclination angle, horizontal distance and the formula Rs=√x²+y² = √( (2v²cos²θ)/g) ( (sinθ/cosθ) - m) + ((m(2v²cos²θ)/g) (sinθ/cosθ)-m) etc...
10. Light fuse
11. Run

Rifling

Rifling is measured by the formula T =((CD²)/L x √(((SG)/10.9))) where T = twist, C = either 150 or 180, D = bullet diameter, L= bullet length, SG = specific gravity of bullet and SG =(Vps) / (Vpw) where v = volume , p = density, s=sample and w=water and was developed to help bullets and cannon balls go faster.

Pachelbel's Cannon

Just in case you came to this page looking for Pachelbel's Cnnon (or Kanon und Gigue fur drei violinen mit Generalbass) - a German baroque pirece written in 1694 but undiscovered and unpublished until 1919. Thought to be written for JC (not JS) Bach's wedding.

It's three violins playing the same piece on top of each other but starting at different times over a bass playing the same two bars over and over.

Although due to the way it slots together it actually creates a pattern of Dmaj tonic, A Maj dominant, Bmin submediant, Dmaj 1st inversion, G maj subdominant, Dmaj tonic, Gmaj subdominant and Amaj dominant. Also known as the plagal sequence.