Watch a pigeon dodge traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian. The bird seems to be the very embodiment of unfulfilled potential—it can fly, and yet it walks. Of course, during World War II, pigeons did a fair amount of flying, carrying messages between the front and command posts. But full pigeon promise was never realized. Because the birds were denied the chance to show what they could do in the air—as pilots.

The story of pigeon pilots, as well as all else pigeon, is told in the new book Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan...And the World, by Courtney Humphries. She ex­­plains that the idea of using pigeons as pilots first occurred to a young B. F. Skinner in 1940, when he watched a flock do some fancy man­­euvering. (He presumably did not get the idea from watching the movie Flight Command, which came out the same year and featured a pilot played by Walter Pidgeon.)

Skinner had already shown that a simple reward system—a nibble of kibble—could get rats to engage in increasingly complex behaviors. Because pigeons already had great navigation skills, Skinner really thought outside the box, coming up with the radical notion of actually putting them in the cockpit. Oh, the birds wouldn’t be piloting planes, because who would get on a plane with a pigeon pilot, unless the airlines agreed to drop the baggage fee. No, these pigeons were going to pilot missiles.

Step one, of course, was putting “a toe­­less sock over the pigeon’s body to restrain the wings and feet,” Humphries explains. The pigeon was thus forced to use its beak to peck at a target—such as a ship, building or specific street corner. Successful pecks were rewarded with pellets of grain. A jerry-built apparatus took the movements of the bird’s head and neck and translated them, using electric motors, into steering moves. Project Pigeon was presented to the National Defense Research Committee for further funding. The committee apparently thought that Skinner should also be restrained and rejected the proposal.

Following Pearl Harbor, however, Skinner resumed his efforts to turn pigeons into WMDs: winged murdering doves. He got a $5,000 check from General Mills—the cereal company, not the unfortunately named army officer of the same period, Major General John S. Mills, who was in fact a pilot and bomb squadron member himself. Ironically, considering the funding source, one key to the enterprise was keeping the birds hungry. “Skinner found that if they were kept just a bit underfed, the birds would work tirelessly for their reward,” Humphries notes. The birds were so good, she says, that Skinner’s team had to work far harder on the mechanical system to translate the avian actions into course corrections than on pilot reliability.

With his pigeon proof-of-concept in place, Skinner was able to get $25,000 from the feds to develop what he called an “organic homing device.” He incorporated redundancy into the design by putting three pigeons into the cockpit, with any birds pecking at the wrong target going hungry until they wised up.

At the same time, the army was trying to perfect a gliding missile called the Pelican, which was being tested in the Garden State. So Skinner’s birds learned to home in on targets in the area where the missile was being developed. That’s right, Skinner was training pigeons to fly a Pelican that would fake-bomb New Jersey.

A final demonstration before the gov­­ernment committee showed that pigeons could indeed be relied on to be ruthless, unrepentant killing machines. But the committee couldn’t get over the fact that they were, ya know, pigeons. Humphries quotes Skinner: “The spectacle of a living pigeon carrying out its assignment, no matter how beautifully, simply reminded the committee of how utterly fantastic our proposal was. I will not say that the meeting was marked by un­restrained merriment, for the merriment was restrained. But it was there.”

1 Comments

1. 1. wlpert.bio-optics 02:01 PM 9/1/08

   I have heard several stories of animals being used as guidance systems. My version of the guided bomb system differs from the one you describe in the September issue of Scientific American and is probably a classic example of hand down stories. My version has it that the pigeons were trained to peck at a visual targets but once they were put to a real test they became disorientated in free fall and the test failed.
   
   The account given in: http://www.ww2aircraft.net/forum/weapons-systems-tech/pigeon-guidance-system-4529.html describes the guidance as having the screen that the pigeons peck at being wired to provide feedback to the bomb flight controls. This would seem to be more plausible, given the period of time, than using the birds head movements to control the system. Also a guided bomb would seem to be the appropriate vehicle rather than a missile which implies a propulsion system. A guided bomb being a device without propulsion but with guidance fins to control the flight path once released. Never the less an interesting story. This latter reference also says that the pigeons were feed marijuana seeds rather than grain seeds as the pigeons were less easily disturbed under confusing circumstances. I'm not sure about all of that. By the way there is a good picture of the three screens and nose cone of the guided bomb at: http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?id=353.
   
   Having worked in the Aerospace/Defense industry in California I heard the following story of bats being used to deliver incendiary devices. The purpose was to set fires and destroy cities in Japan during WW II. My version has it that replicas of wooden Japanese buildings were built on an Air Force base to train the bats to fly and roost under the eves of the buildings. Incendiary devices would be attached to the bats and timing devices used to set off the devices. When the real test came about the bats not only flew to the replica Japanese buildings but also to some of the aircraft hangers and all caught on fire. The account given in: http://ww.dmnintresting.com/?p=403 attributes this progam to a dentist Lytle S. Adams. The intent is identical and it is stated that an auxiliary Army base in Carlsbad NM was set on fire during an accidentical release of armed bats. The program was apparently funded to approx. $2M but was canceled with the impending development of the atomic bomb.
   
   Another California story has it that pigeons were used by Lockheed Martin to deliver microfilm images of drawings from their Sunnyvale facility to a research facility in the Santa Cruz mountains. The story seems to be born out in a couple of web sites: http://www.schoolnet.ph/school/forum/message?message_id=7492&forum_id=7413 and http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine.MAG1125883/index.htm
   Lockheed had considered transmitting the documents over an existing microwave facility but it would have required an expensive printer at the receiving end. In the end they used pigeons to deliver microfilm images of drawings put in canisters attached to the pigeons. Although the two facilities were close, it took a driver some 90 minutes to make the trip which was slowed by traffic and the winding road. Pigeons made the trip in 30 minutes and at less than one percent of the dollar cost at that time in 1981. My version has it that the program was canceled because so many pigeons were lost to hawks in the Patchen Santa Cruz mountain pass. One of the references above says only two pigeons were lost over a 16 month period.
   
   One last pigeon story. I happened on an exhibit at the main Los Angeles public Library that had an touring exhibit of "Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business" in '04. One of the exhibits was centerd on Ida Rosenthal who turned a small dress making operation into the Maiden form Brassiere Company in 1960. During WW II they departed from their usual line to make a "pigeon vest," a pouch to protect carrier pigeons being carried by parachuter's into North Africa. The vest is described and shown in: http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/0103155.html
   

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