I know that stool-pigeons were used to gather intelligence 😊

Mog

ISTR that much of what has been discussed here was on an episode of QI some years ago ...

I thought it needed a duck and a cat and a pigeon. You flew in the direction the pigeon pointed, kept the cat the right way up and when the duck lowered its tail and tilted its feet up, it was time to flare for the landing.

Some of the old nuclear land mines had a chicken inside them , not sure if it was a hen or a rooster . My guess is that it was a hen as a rooster can be hard to coral into a confined space .

Salute!

Best thread drift in many moons.

Gums sends...

National Safety Council of Australia planned to use pigeons in aircraft for search and rescue, don't know how far they got with it before the organisation went bust. Also engaged in fire fighting in the mountains, among other things, one proposal they had was to parachute horses into the back country from a C-130 so the fire fighters had a means of transport, believe it or not.

Megan,
I can confirm the NSCA were involved in trials of pigeons to assist in SAR activities. In 1988 or 89 (the memory fades) the boss and I were flown to Townsville in their Dornier to see some trails. From memory it looked very effective. The "simulator" even had a shaker device and audio to simulate the ride in a chopper. Back at home base we had already seen the trials of para dogs, groin protection for humans jumping into wooded areas to either search for downed pilots or fight fires and had a brief on the potential for horses to parachute.

As the first of the contract SAR bases, i must say the services offered were impressive and I'm not sure ADF had sufficient funds to pay for those levels of service had the organisation survived long enough the negotiate a contract renewal.

Gne

.

The trouble with the NSCA was it didn't have any funds either, operated on bank loans provided on the basis of shipping containers full of equipment, except they weren't, full of equipment that is. A Sale local who was a loans officer at one of the banks lost his job because he refused to provide Freddo with cash. The best thing that happened was when the organisation closed its doors, plenty of people did well out of it, gaining CPL(H) from ab initio, wintering in the Alice with a Caravan to skydive to their hearts content. We were located just over the road (Esso) and used to shake our heads on how they were getting away with it all.

Could you not use a reef knot? :E

My late uncle served with the RAF (on the ground) in India and Burma in WW2. He told me about one episode where resupply trials were held, where mules were dropped in parachute equipped crates from very low level. Some of the parachutes didn’t open and the crates rolled over and over, breaking apart. They went over to the drop zone expecting to have to deal with battered mule corpses but they were all up on their feet and calmly eating grass!

Before AH was invented the parrot on a perch was tried, apparently they always 'lean' to the vertical.

The trouble was the smell of fish on their feet.

I heard that the Russian dog-bombs probably failed because they were trained to crawl under tanks successfully.
But, the training was done with Russian tanks which make a different noise (Russian engines) to German tanks (German engines) so when released they turned around and ran back towards the tanks that made the noise they'd been trained for.

In my defence of my poor spelling if you say coral with a heavy Scottish accent it does sound like corral , mish moneypenny :)

I'd go wth trained pigeons every time if the alternative was pointing a gun or mortar roughly downrange and yelling "Insh'allah!" as you pull the lanyard.

Many questions arise; why on earth would you put a chicken, alive or dead, in a land mine? What was supposed to trip a nuclear land mine?

To keep it in warm of course. You needed 3 chickens in fact. Search for Blue Peacock, Blue Bunny or Brown Bunny.

Ha ha ha! That's one big land mine, 7 tons not including the chicken and the feed. Seems a battery or a little chink of Plutonium 238 might have been the better answer.

Wasn't Pigeon Induced Oscillation (PIO) a problem? (I'm only basing this on the lecture notes I received.)

According to this source, Russian tanks used diesel, while German tanks used petrol. Unsurprisingly the dogs knew the difference and failed the first time they were tried in combat. But they went on to successfully destroy 304 German tanks.

An older concept in animal-based navigation: ‘Powder of Sympathy’

The powder was also applied to solve the longitude problem in the suggestion of an anonymous pamphlet of 1687 entitled "Curious Enquiries". The pamphlet theorised that a wounded dog could be put aboard a ship, with the knife used to injure the dog left in the trust of a timekeeper on shore, who would then dip said knife into the powder at a predetermined time and cause the creature to yelp, thus giving the captain of the ship an accurate knowledge of the time.