These 100-Year-Old Aerial Photos Were Taken by Pigeons!!

Although pigeons nowadays are largely regarded as grubby urban pests, bumblers for bread crumbs, and unwelcome statuary redecorators -- in the not-too-distant past, their service to mankind was much loftier indeed. Not only were these hardy birds used to swiftly carry important messages and materials across great distances, for a brief stint at the turn of the last century, an elite group of camera-wielding pigeons also became early pioneers of a then burgeoning field: aerial photography.

In 1903, a German pharmacist named Julius Neubronner started employing carrier pigeons to receive and fulfill emergency prescriptions from a hospital in the region

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This is pretty cool!!


Source and legal


Source and legal

I had no idea that they did this all way back in the early 1900's! Cool eh?

And this too:

During the both World Wars, various militaries experimented in the using camera-strapped pigeons on reconnaissance missions, though it's unclear how helpful these photographs actually were.

and

According to some reports, still mostly classified, the CIA attached battery operated cameras to the birds even as late as the 1970s.

Thoughts?!

They also dropped flocks of bats with timed incendiary devices attached to them from airplanes in the hopes that they would roost in buildings and start mass fires in enemy cities.
Wiki Bat Bombs

Brings back memories when I was a coup cleaner...boss had hundreds.He would clap his hands to order the pigeons around.Homing pigeons used to carry messages back and forth...anyways,coo coo cool ..snf

This is really cool! I had never imagined that we imagined such as this .

I knew about aerial photography in WWI but I didn't know it stretched a decade and a half back before then. It would have been kind of hard to apply aerial pigeon photography in the midst of WWI, but who knows how well it would actually work?.

reply to post by Nspekta


Really neat. It is incredible what some of these creatures are capable of and how helpful they have been furthering mans progress. We give them no rights and too little credit. S&F for a wonderful thread!