Watching the nano-second messaging of modern electioneering from Washington to Paris to London, I couldn’t help but think of pigeons.
Carrier pigeons, to be precise. I was thinking of an earlier era, in an African setting, when I worked for Reuters before embarking on a career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. In the run-up to the election in 1980 that brought Robert Mugabe to power, I was part of the coverage of the ceasefire in Zimbabwe’s seven-year bush war that preceded the vote.
In the process, I became the last Reuters correspondent known to have sent dispatches by carrier pigeon.
In late 1979, two colleagues and I deployed in an armor-plated Land Rover to accompany New Zealand special forces who, under the terms of the ceasefire preceding Zimbabwe’s elections and independence, set up an assembly point at which hundreds of Soviet-armed guerrilla fighters who had fought the white-minority Rhodesian regime of Ian D. Smith were supposed to congregate.
It was in the remote savannah and scrub, and this was an era long before satellite phones, cell phones, smartphones, or, indeed, any phones. In this far-flung spot, there were no communications available to the outside world.
But we had a lucky break. A friendly editor at The Bulawayo Chronicle secured for us a wicker crate of 10 carrier pigeons trained to fly back to their home loft in the city of Bulawayo. From there, our messages would be sent by runner to the Chronicle’s newsroom and transmitted to the Reuters bureau in the capital, Salisbury (later renamed Harare), for onward telexing to Johannesburg and, finally, the Reuters headquarters in London.
There was a particular piquancy to this arrangement since Baron Julius Reuter, the eponymous founder of the wire service, had in 1850 used squadrons of trained homing pigeons to bridge a 76-mile gap in the burgeoning telegraph networks spanning Europe to fly market-moving financial news from Brussels to the German city of Aachen. Pigeons, in other words, were the Internet of their time.
In this far-flung spot, there were no communications available to the outside world.
A pigeon fancier in Bulawayo trained us in the arcane ways of handling the birds’ onboard G.P.S. First you wrote your story, then with spidery script you could squeeze 400 words onto tissue paper contained inside a 30-pack of local Madison cigarettes, and you folded this masterpiece of precision into a tiny container taped to the bird’s leg.
Then, deftly restraining the pigeon’s legs between index and middle fingers, with a thumb over those straining wings, you planted a tender peck on the bird’s head and, with two hands, tossed it aloft.
But first you needed news. So there we sat in our little journalists’ encampment outside the assembly point and waited. At first nothing happened.
The pigeons cooed.
We fretted.
Then—an event. A lone freedom fighter in suspiciously pristine fatigues, carrying what looked like a newly issued AK-47 loaded with a full clip of lethal, live ammo sauntered into camp and sat with us.
“How are things, comrade?” we inquired, using the prevalent revolutionary form of address.
“I am very hungry,” he said.
At that very moment, an apparently suicidal pigeon cooed in the crate. Comradely eyes brightened. We plied him with our precious stash of canned food.
“Please, comrade,” someone said, “don’t eat the communications.”
He told us that, out there, somewhere, hundreds of his brothers-in-arms were waiting to check in at the assembly point.
News!
But when we lofted our chosen bird to send word of this development back to Bulawayo, it fluttered to the branches of a tree and sat there, refusing to fly alone. Only years later did I discover that the original Reuters protocol for pigeons and news was to send them in flights of three. Hastily, we wrote the story again—scribble words, tape to bird’s leg, peck on head, lob aloft, and presto! The duo headed off in tight formation to Bulawayo like Top Gun’s Iceman and Maverick.
With spidery script you could squeeze 400 words onto tissue paper contained inside a 30-pack of local Madison cigarettes.
This insight into the pigeon fancier’s tradecraft did not go unnoticed. So, finally, when something big happened in the form of hundreds of guerrillas marching into the assembly point, we wrote our story and sent it aloft with the first bird, which then just sat in a tree. Then, in a frenzy of anxiety—even though our pigeon stocks were getting perilously low—I scrawled a message onto a second sheet of tissue paper: “This bird is accompanying the bird that’s got the story.”
That bird without the story flew off toward Bulawayo. Alone. While its putative companion carrying the real scoop bestirred itself in a leisurely sort of way to take off on a bearing that, as far as we could see, led somewhere in the direction of the Kalahari Desert.
Only later, when we returned to Bulawayo, preening with pigeonly puffed chests, did we discover that our less inventive colleagues back in the capital had made us the butt of a degree of mockery. One U.P.I. dispatch, indeed, observed—somewhat libelously—that our pigeons must have decided to “take the scenic route” because, by the time they arrived back at the loft in Bulawayo, their news was “at least 24 hours old.”
Why dwell now on these events? Well, disturbing news has been reaching us in recent days from Sandringham, the monarchic spread in Norfolk, England. There is speculation that the royal pigeon loft there may soon be dismantled after King Charles III, under pressure from animal-rights groups, quietly withdrew the patronage his mother had extended to two pigeon-racing organizations.
If those birds are under threat, then surely those of us who have dined out on our pigeon yarns over the decades owe them a figurative farewell peck, and a debt of gratitude, as they embark on their final homing to the great loft in the sky.
Alan Cowell is a former New York Times foreign correspondent currently at work on a new novel, The Obituarist
