History Main / InstantMessengerPigeon

** The Pointless Albatross can evidently be trained to carry messages between ''distant continents''.

As useful as pigeon post proved to be during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, this method of communication possessed some considerable drawbacks. Firstly and most importantly, pigeon post is only a one-way communication device. A homing pigeon's capacity to reliably deliver messages was entirely dependent upon its ability to locate its nest and mate. Thus, the pigeons had to first be transported from their nesting location to the senders' location via slower-than-pigeon transit. Once released, the bird would fly straight to its home and not budge thereafter; for mutual conversation, both parties needed either several pigeons transported in the other's location to send home, or some means of retrieving them after sending a message.[[note]]Sometimes a pigeon could be trained to go back and forth between two locations, one counting as "home" and the other being a major food source, but moving on.[[/note]] Homing pigeons were also prone to getting lost or eaten by predators during particularly difficult journeys, which necessitated sending the same message with several pigeons, some or all of which could fall into the hands of a third party. Indeed, the Germans even trained falcons to do specifically this during the aforementioned siege.

* One episode of ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'' has Pidgey being used this way. This is somewhat more believable, since Pokémon are considerably more intelligent than real birds (most of them understand, but [[PokemonSpeak cannot speak]], human langauges). The episode also acknowledged that this form of long distance communication is dying out due to [[TechnologyMarchesOn advances in technology]].
* In ''Manga/OresamaTeacher'', Mafuyu exchanges letteres with her pen pal, Ichigo Love [[spoiler:actually Okegawa]] using a carrier pigeon.

** In ''Recap/AsterixAndTheBlackGold'', the villains use a messenger-''fly'' as a go between.
** PlayedWith in ''Recap/AsterixAndTheMissingScroll'': The Romans make great use of pigeons. The narration even calls it the latest communication technology, and it’s shown to be more effective than the traditional mail, which his transported by ox-cart. However, that this technique is not exactly fault-proof becomes clear when first a pigeon carrying a message to Rome accidently ends up on the ship of the pirates, twice a Roman accidently releases the pigeons before they can attach the messages to them, and in the end a pigeon delivering the message that Caesar is on his way to Amorica arrives after the fight is over and Caesar has already left again.

* As shown in the Anime folder, a sidestory of ''Fanfic/PokemonResetBloodlines'' references how Flying-type Pokémon were used for delivering messages, until the method died out as TechnologyMarchesOn. Falkner's father Walker specifically had them work like this before becoming a Gym Leader.

* ''Film/TheMummyReturns'' featured an Instant Messenger ''Falcon'' named "Horus", used to communicate with the leaders of the Medjai. Apparently, Horus is smart enough to track down the leaders of a group of nomads, then return to a group of adventurers who are wandering all over the Middle East. The bird eventually gets shot out of the sky by TheDragon, though. It's highly exaggerated by the movie, since they generally don't have to do it when the owner isn't staying in one place, but well-trained falcons ''can'' fly long distances and then return to their owner.

** Harry's owl, Hedwig, is described as being particularly good at this, to the point where she never requires an address to deliver a letter. Hedwig has even managed to deliver a letter to a magically hidden location that can't be found without being told where it is by a specific person. Somewhat justified, as it's been established that wards don't always work on non-wizards. For example, house elves can apparate through anti-apparation charms.

* The Wizard Derk, in ''Literature/DarkLordOfDerkholm'' and ''Year of the Griffin'' by Creator/DianaWynneJones, breeds very clever pigeons, who are smart enough to know where people are, and are very devoted to getting there.
* Used rather straight, but [[JustifiedTrope justified]], in ''Literature/HellsGate'' by Creator/DavidWeber and LindaEvans. The messenger birds are super-fast, can be set to any destination, and are quite unlikely to be intercepted -- but they're not pigeons, they're giant humming birds enhanced by powerful magic to be perfect for their role. And they ''do'' move at finite speed, which is Arcana's major disadvantage against their opponents (who must make do with mundane technology instead of magic, but do have telepaths).

** In ''The Black Gryphon'' Urtho's camp is host to a great number of "messenger birds" who appear to be like small parrots. They can act as recording devices or spies, recite messages, find locations, and associate faces with names. They seem to be only useful in the camp - they aren't terribly strong fliers, they are brightly colored and noisy, and they can choose not to give a message to someone they know won't feed or tickle them like they like.

* Kel's sparrows in ''Literature/ProtectorOfTheSmall'' are often sent to try and find people, and bring them back sometimes. It's once proposed that she carry paper and ink so they could carry messages, but this isn't followed up on. This is justified because the sparrows are both unusually intelligent thanks to [[Literature/TheImmortals Daine the Wildmage]] and Kel never sends them as far away as a messenger pigeon would go--usually just elsewhere around the camp, village, or battlefield.

* The secret agents of ''Series/TheWildWildWest'' have at least four over the course of the series - Henry, Henrietta, Annabella and Arabella. Artemus Gordon likes to warn them against stopping and talking to hawks.

*** Google uses sneakernets to transfer data, in come cases into the petabyte (~1,000,000 gigabytes) range, and many military and high-security commercial systems utilizes an air-gap (physically disconnected) where updates and data output have to be transferred by physically moving data storage.

* The ''Literature/SwallowsAndAmazons'' novel ''Pigeon Post'' is naturally partly about this. The kids have three pigeons, but one of them is unreliable and often takes two days to reach home via a meandering route rather than going straight there, so they don't use it...until the end, when they have to to alert their parents of an emergency, and of course that time it flies straight and true.

* ''Series/ThePrisoner1967'' episode "Hammer into Anvil" has Number Six catching a pigeon, fastening a note to its leg and letting it fly. It wouldn't work to send a message and it wasn't intended to - #6 was playing mind games with #2 pretending to be investigating Village security.

* The old Sega game ''Warmonger'' had you communicate with your generals by messenger pigeon. It took longer the farther away they were and you could, if bored, watch the bird's flight as it went across country. The birds were pretty reliable although if they flew over an enemy army the soldiers would take pot shots at them.

* ''Webcomic/TalesOfTheQuestor'' averts it. The first time, the bird gets eaten by a hawk, the second time, a bird refuses to go out into cold weather. Third time, they send back a ''mechanical'' bird -- which ends its flight by diving through a window and concussing him. In these cases some of the other aspects of the trope are justified by use of magic, in fact in the first example our hero simply writes a new, much shorter message and sends the hawk.

* {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d in the ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'' episode "The Runaway", when Sokka purchases a Messenger Hawk only to discover it didn't come with a manual. Telling it to take a message to "Gran-Gran, South Pole" doesn't help, though by the end of the episode it seems to have developed a magical GPS service for Toph's parents, though they at least live in a town and not ''the south pole''. To be fair, there hasn't been any evidence yet that Hawky actually successfully delivered the message. Also subverted two episodes earlier when another Messenger Hawk was intercepted by a trained [[MixAndMatchCritters eagle/vulture]]-like bird and the message is destroyed. There was also an instant where someone falsely claimed to have sent a message and the person they were talking to was perfectly willing to believe it had been lost, so they said next time they'll send ''two''.

** To put it into perspective, a single webpage ''could'' be loaded in one forth-and-back transmission (though that would require bad programming practice from the website, if it's got any styling or interactivity at all), as long as it doesn't have any image (even in the background) or any applet. Each image would take another forth-and-back transmission, and some applets quite a few. And if the size of a packet happened to be more than the size of a message a pigeon can carry, that would mean yet another back transmission. So indeed, it's not feasible for the Internet.

* Played with in ''Series/{{Blackadder}} Goes Forth''. Blackadder kills a messenger pigeon and eats it to remove any evidence of receiving suicidal orders, in order to have a plausible explanation for not following them. Unfortunately for him, General Melchett is personally familiar with the pigeon, and is able to recognise its remaining feather -- and the message it was carrying was an announcement that shooting messenger pigeons has been made a capital offense due to the number of orders not getting through.

* Parodied in ''Series/TheMonkees'' episode "Monkee See, Monkee Die". The boys are fogged in a haunted mansion and talk about using a homing pigeon to get a message out, and one conveniently lands on the windowsill. The note on it's leg says "please don't attach notes to my leg, I am not a carrier pigeon."

** ''Discworld/MonstrousRegiment'' appears to use messenger pigeons properly. They are sent over short distances from a traveling remote reporter to the ''Ankh-Morpork Times'' stationary base in Borogravia. The birds are frequently waylaid (especially by the Morporkian military) and long-distance and two-way communication is handled exclusively by semaphore telegraph.

** Note that some thieves in ''Discworld/TheColourOfMagic'' used a "homing rat" to send a message. It's unclear if this is a regular rat trained to track the recipient down by smell, a magic-enhanced rat as per above, or even some fantastical species of rodent, unique to the Disc, that shares pigeons' homing instincts. For the pigeons, however, it's stated that the local gargoyle (who feed almost exclusively on pigeons) population has culled most of the stupid pigeons from the population and the surviving pigeons HadToBeSharp.

* ''WebOriginal/HowToHero'' frequently mentions carrier pigeons as a viable form of contacting other people. At one point the author of the guide muses that if he had a carrier pigeon he would name it Carry the Pigeon. Carry would then go on to appear in a few other entries.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/{{Hercules}}'' episode "Hercules and the Techno Greeks", when Hercules is appointed the defender of Abacus Valley, he gets a little bird that will seek him out and attract his attention whenever the valley needs defending (or the inhabitants are freaking out over nothing), which he calls his beeper.

* As a matter of fact, homing pigeons have been used as early as the days of Cyrus the Great. As TheOtherWiki [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_post points out]], pigeons were also used by UsefulNotes/JuliusCaesar during the Gallic Wars.

* Used a little more realistically in the ''Series/PushingDaisies'' episode "Pigeon", since the bird in question only had to travel back and forth between two locations. Except the bird presumably nested in one location and thus flew there, was given a note, and... flew back to where it had been. They were in theory using one single bird to communicate over the course of years. The bird had one of its wings replaced by a stuffed parrot's wing that was attached with a bejeweled harness. Where it nested was the least of its problems.

* ''Series/GameOfThrones'' seems to go back and forth with this trope. In the earlier episodes, messenger ravens seemed to able to come and go at amazingly fast speeds. However, this is averted when Robb sets up camp outside of The Twins, where he has his men shoot down every Raven the Freys attempt to send out to keep them from warning the Lannisters of their presence. This trope is actually more an effect of the show's tendency to ignore time. The world's BizarreSeasons mean that there's no change in weather over the year-long time-span of a 10-episode season, which coupled with the absence of a formal calendar, has the effect of allowing the show to cut past weeks at a time of characters traveling from one place to another or waiting for a raven to show up with a message.

* Averting in ''The Mouse on the Moon'', a sequel to ''Literature/TheMouseThatRoared''. At one point, a British spy tries to send a message from Grand Fenwick to London using one of Grand Fenwick's messenger pigeons. He attaches the message to the pigeon's leg and tells it to fly to London, but it immediately goes back to its cage.

* In ''Webcomic/{{Strays}}'', [[http://www.straysonline.com/comic/142.htm Feral gets a messenger hawk]]. Which can, apparently, track him down personally, since he's on the move.

** This is a concept known as a sneakernet. It's almost universally faster due to the relatively high density of storage versus network speeds. While it's commonly seen as a trivial exercise, in high-security applications or where massive amounts of data are involved, data couriers are used. As one engineer put it "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tape drives."

* ''Film/TopSecret''. The traitor [[spoiler:Nigel]] uses homing pigeons to send messages to the East German government. Played for laughs, as the pigeons are shown wearing aviator's helmets.

** This is a concept known as a sneakernet. It's almost universally faster due to the relatively high density of storage versus network speeds. While it's commonly seen as a trivial exercise, in high-security applications or where massive amounts of data are involved, data couriers are used.

[[quoteright:350:[[Franchise/{{Tintin}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/instant_messenger_pigeon_5.jpg]]]]

!!Examples

[[folder:Comics]]
* One issue of ''ComicBook/ConanTheBarbarian'' has a particularly horrendous example. A mole in Conan's army was sending messages by pigeons to her employer, the enemy. Conan outwits them because, as it turns out, he's had archers intercept and shoot down the pigeon, read the message, then put the message on another pigeon and send off so the enemy wouldn't suspect anything. Gee, good thing pigeons come with standardised directions these days, yeah?
* ''ComicBook/LuckyLuke''

* Played for laughs in ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}} and the Vikings'', where Justforkix's pet pigeon Shortmessageservix is trained to send messages like a mobile phone. His coos and warbles even sound like touch-tone dialling.

* ''Literature/{{Discworld}}''

* Probably [[JustifiedTrope justified]] in ''Franchise/HarryPotter'', as the owls could very easily be [[AWizardDidIt enchanted or supernaturally bred]]. There have also been cases of mail being stolen.

-->'''Mr. Weasley:''' We used to use owls, but the mess was terrible. You can imagine the droppings...
** Harry's owl, Hedwig, is described as being particularly good at this, to the point where she never requires an address to deliver a letter.
** Hedwig has even managed to deliver a letter to a magically hidden location that can't be found without being told where it is by a specific person. Somewhat justified, as it's been established that wards don't always work on non-wizards. For example, house elves can apparate through anti-apparation charms.

** The Order of the Phoenix, not trusting the security of owl post in wartime, used the Patronus charm to dispatch supernatural animal messengers to one another.

* Averted in ''Manga/{{Buddha}}'', where Naradatta convinces Tatta to possess an animal in a desperate attempt to contact his mentor, Asita. In between third party interceptions, exhaustion, and being attacked by predators, Tatta possesses several animals and ends up killing nearly all of them. When Asita finally gets the message, his first reaction is to severely punish Naradatta for being so reckless with the lives of animals.

[[folder:Film]]
* Averted in ''Film/TheLostBattalion''. Every time the titular battalion tries to send a messenger pigeon back to headquarters, the Germans quickly shoot them down. It's only through sheer luck that they manage to get one through the German lines. In RealLife the pigeon that made it back (the third) was [[{{Determinator}} shot three times]] and lost an eye and a leg. She was awarded the Cross de Guerre for her service.

* ''Webcomic/TheOrderOfTheStick'': Vaarsuvius develops the spell "Greater Animal Messenger": it sends three messenger birds that couldn't deviate from the path or be affected by illusions, and would verbally repeat a message once they got within five feet of their target. Vaarsuvius made it clear that the absurd amount of time and lost sleep [[TemptingFate has assured success]]. The birds were, [[TVTropesWillRuinYourLife of course]], shot down with arrows and eaten by their intended recipients. Earlier averted when Vaarsuvius's familiar (a raven) is being utilised to transmit information on a bandit camp instantly to Vaarsuvius. Unfortunately, the bandits hit it with a thousand arrows the moment it flies over (to Haley's exasperated cry "Oh come on! Thousands of birds must fly over every day!")

* ''Webcomic/TalesOfTheQuestor'' averts it twice. The first time, the bird gets eaten by a hawk, the second time, a bird refuses to go out into cold weather.
** Third time, they send back a ''mechanical'' bird -- which ends its flight by diving through a window and concussing him.
** In these cases some of the other aspects of the trope are justified by use of magic, in fact in the first example our hero simply writes a new, much shorter message and sends the hawk.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheLoudHouse'': in the episode "Fandom Pains", Lucy and the Morticians Club members use messenger bats to send their protest letters and the petition to get the character Tristan removed from ''The Vampires of Melancholia'' to the studio. However, since their demands are not met, it's likely the bats never made it there.

[[quoteright:350:[[Manga/{{magico}} http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/instant_messenger_pigeon.jpg]]]]

* ''Series/ThePrisoner'' episode "Hammer into Anvil" has Number Six catching a pigeon, fastening a note to its leg and letting it fly. It wouldn't work to send a message and it wasn't intended to - #6 was playing mind games with #2 pretending to be investigating Village security.

** Note that some thieves in ''Discworld/TheColourOfMagic'' used a "homing rat" to send a message. It's unclear if this is a regular rat trained to track the recipient down by smell, a magic-enhanced rat as per above, or even some fantastical species of rodent, unique to the Disc, that shares pigeons' homing instincts. For the pigeons, however, it's stated that the local gargoyle (who feed almost exclusively on pigeons) population has culled most of the stupid pigeons from the population and hey HadToBeSharp .

** Note that some thieves in ''Discworld/TheColourOfMagic'' used a "homing rat" to send a message. It's unclear if this is a regular rat trained to track the recipient down by smell, a magic-enhanced rat as per above, or even some fantastical species of rodent, unique to the Disc, that shares pigeons' homing instincts.

As useful as pigeon post proved to be during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, this method of communication possessed some considerable drawbacks: the homing pigeons' capacity to reliably deliver messages was entirely dependent upon their ability to locate their nest and mate. Thus, the pigeons had to first be transported from their nesting location to the senders' location (via slower-than-pigeon transit), and once released, the bird would fly straight to its home and not budge thereafter; for mutual conversation, both parties needed either several pigeons transported in the other's location to send home, or some means of retrieving them after sending a message.[[note]]Sometimes a pigeon could be trained to go back and forth between two locations, one counting as "home" and the other being a major food source, but moving on.[[/note]] Homing pigeons were also prone to getting lost or eaten by predators during particularly difficult journeys, which necessitated sending the same message with several pigeons, some or all of which could fall into the hands of a third party. Indeed, the Germans even trained falcons to do specifically this during the aforementioned siege.