The story of a Carrier Pigeon

On Monday, July 31, 2000, started for all of us, scrabble players, a very busy week. Everyday we had to cross our city of Paris, France, to go and play in a beautiful building, the “Cité des Sciences” (City of Sciences) where one can discover anything about everything as far as sciences are concerned. The children have there a special place called “la Cité des Enfants” (Children City) which can welcome in different parts children from the age of two or three to the age of twelve. Just behind the main structure is the Geode, a huge and bright sphere in which visitors can watch lots of very interesting three-dimensional movies which have been filmed all over the world, above the mountains or deep down in the depths of the oceans.

On the occasion of this memorable event, the last World Championship of the second millennium, thousands of people came from Europe (from France of course but also from Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Romania, England...), North America (mostly from Quebec), Central America (from the French Caribbean Islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin), Africa (from many countries now independent but which have been once French or Belgium colonies such as Morocco and Tunisia in North Africa and Madagascar, Tchad, Rwanda, Senegal, the Democratic Republic of Congo formerly known as Zaïre...), from the Middle East (Lebanon where they have an important club in Beyrouth), from the Far East (the French Islands of Reunion and New Caledonia but also from Vietnam where our French language had been somewhat forgotten for many years but which many people come back to), from French Polynesia on the Pacific Ocean…

When I came back home after a hard day’s work of finding the most interesting words which would help me stay among the good players, I had a few things to do before going to the kitchen to get my dinner ready. I did not look immediately up to a window casement which is located on the left between the window and the ceiling and which I always leave half-opened but when I did, what did I see behind the pane? the tiny head of a pigeon whose eyes were staring sadly at me. At first I was surprised and did not know what to do. After a while, I called the janitor and as he told me he would come to my apartment, I brought my extension ladder in front of the window pane so that he could climb and see whether the bird was wounded or was just resting on the sill for a while. I climbed up the ladder myself before he came: the bird looked like a feather ball with a small head straight up and its eyes opening at the slightest sound.

When the janitor climbed the ladder in his turn, he watched the bird and then he told me: “it is a carrier-pigeon we have here as I can see the ring around its foot. It’s just resting for a while before flying away. Were it wounded, it could not have flown up here.” After he had finished his explanation, I told him that we should feed the bird: I thus put corn flake crumbs on a plate, water in a plastic cup and I handled the whole thing to the janitor who put it on the windowsill so that the pigeon could eat and drink before flying away. As soon as we had given it both the corn flakes and the water, the bird started first to drink as it must have been very thirsty and to eat the crumbs. I was so happy I had thought of feeding it as I felt it’s what the pigeon needed to get its strength back. We then decided to leave our friend alone so that it could rest a little more. The janitor told me he would come back in the morning and that if the pigeon was still there, he would take it and untie the ring to learn where it came from. Thus he would be able to call its trainer in order to ask him what to do with the bird.

I called the janitor two hours later to tell him that after having drunk and eaten, the bird was now curled up as if it wanted to sleep. He told me to leave it alone until the next morning, assuring me that he would come and get it at 7.45 a.m. as I had myself to leave by 8 a.m. As soon as I woke up in the morning, I went to the kitchen and as I did not see the small head anymore I climbed up the ladder that I had left there on purpose. Unfortunately the bird was still there but instead of being curled up, it was now walking on the windowsill as if it felt safe there and did not want to leave anymore. I gave it more water and more crumbs and when the janitor came I told him to do for the best but to manage so that I would not find the pigeon on the sill when I came back late in the evening. I had in fact seen that there were already droppings and I did not want them to start running on the ceramic wall below (as I discovered they had when I had to throw some water and bleach to clean them off the next morning).

Getting home around 9 p.m. after a very tiring day, I of course went straight to the kitchen and looked toward the windowsill: the pigeon was not there anymore. When I called the janitor he told me what had happened: he had come back after half an hour (I forgot to say that he always keeps the keys to my apartment) and took the bird with him. He then called his veterinary to ask him what to do and the doctor told him to put him in his cellar and to carry on giving it bread and water. He event went to the chemist to buy a fortifying drug he made the bird an injection with. He had also taken the pigeon’s ring off and, looking at the trainer’s address and telephone number, he saw that he lived in our neighbourhood. He decided to call him after he had completed his morning activities. Just before calling him, he went back to the cellar but unfortunately he could not be of any help to our small friend which had died in the meantime.

When he called the trainer to give him the sad news, the man told him that his bird must have been exhausted as it had just flown all the way from Lourdes, the well-known pilgrimage town devoted to the Virgin Mary since Bernadette Soubiroux’s visions in 1858, located 808 kilometres (about 500 miles) from Paris. He thanked him of course for having fed and looked after the bird.

I was so sorry as I would have thought that coming all the way from a miracle town, the bird should have been safer... Besides my father who had fought in the first world war had often told me about pigeon-carriers. They had been very useful to carry messages in that war as well as in 1870-71 when news took much longer to reach an audience than nowadays when even I, an old lady, can “surf as much as I want on the web”. I suppose that to-day’s trainers raise pigeon-carriers for competition but knowing that even middle-age castles had pigeon houses, I suppose that they have been used for a long time as they could reach their destination quicker than horses. In any case, I am glad I could give the bird a little comfort before it died.