would have left to return again over the aerial path which had brought him to Évreux. He only thought of finding his lost cote.
We carried him to Graud-Couronne and set him free a few steps from his cote. But the sense of orientation from a distance, the sixth sense, was acting almost to the exclusion of the other five. The bird made his way back again, passed, as if hypnotized, in sight of his home—without seeing it,[1] and reached Evreux the point in the itinerary which he sought to reestablish.
His calculation was foiled, when led to the home of his owner and set at liberty he then knew where he was. The five senses, reawakened by stronger stimuli, rose supreme, and the sixth sense, having become useless, refused to act.
There is at Orleans a depot for pigeons where the birds are kept indoors. The pigeons which are shut in here and which come from the cotes of Paris and the north, live in a semi-obscurity and in absolute ignorance of what passes outside. When, after a month or two of confinement, they are to be released, the precaution is taken to carry them some miles from this transitory home, to which, moreover, no pleasant memory can attract them. We have ascertained that very often the pigeons know how to return to this house to which they do not even know the approaches. They come and rest on the roof, then after a very brief stay, take their bearings and disappear on the way back to their own home.
The law of retracement enables us to explain the action. Taken to the station of Aubrais, for instance, and released there, he will retrace his way and come to hover over the depot which represents for him the terminus of the road by which he was brought to Orleans. It is, then, from there that he will depart to reverse that journey whose memory has remained deeply graven on his mind.
We might cite a great many examples of the same sort to show that a lost pigeon always returns to the point where it was released. To convince ourselves of this it is sufficient to glance at the roofs of the stations of Paris, Orleans, Blois, Tours, Poitiers, Bordeaux, etc., where every Sunday, in good weather, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of pigeons are set free. On Monday numbers of pigeons, lost the day before, return here. Having been unsuccessful in their first attempt to return to their homes, they will make a second and even a third attempt to find the right road.
When set free the day before, the pigeon took his flight, he flew as fast as possible from the place where he was released, a spot to which
- ↑ If sight is the principal means for orientation for the pigeon, those living in the cotes of the Grenelle quarter must be particularly favored since the building of the Eiffel tower. This is a prominent landmark easily seen within a radius of 200 kilometers around Paris. But upon inquiry we find the percentage of losses suffered during the training season from the pigeon farms around the Champ de Mars is exactly the same to-day as before the construction of the tower.
