Homing pigeons, how do they?

Question

Find their way home, in olden times they used to put a piece of paper around its foot, how the heck does it know where its dropping the message off, I'm really curious and find this hard to believe, how would it know where to go, thanks for your answers, and no silly ones please.

Answer 1

It is call a term refered to as a COMPASS MIND. Where if you go buy yourself a compass you will see the needle of the compass will continue to point to N and S no matter which way you turn the compass, so you would never lose your sense of direction. This is the way those birds are born to use their own minds.Only theirs is mental knowledge of their sense of direction.  

Answer 2

I believe that the birds were raised in the specific aviary that they were meant to return to in the case of the message.  This is why people kept so many pigeons, ones in different cages for different places.  They know enough to go back to where they were born.  How, I'm not quite sure.  I do believe that it has something to do with the magnetic poles.

Answer 3

Pigeons have the ability to find their homes, the place they were raised.  I don't think anyone really knows how they do this.  There have been experiments based on theories that they can tell the direction by the sun, by the earth's magnetic field, and even by smells.  I don't believe any theory is conclusive so far.

Some pigeons do this better than others, and over the centuries their abilities have been improved through selective breeding.  For a long time now people have raised pigeons as a hobby for 'racing', which is really only seeing which ones find their way home the fastest.

Pigeons can't be sent just anywhere.  They find their way back to their own nest.  So you if you want them to bring messages somewhere, they have to be raised there in advance.

They were used as late as WWII, in fact there are pigeons that won medals in WWII, and one or two that have statues erected to them for saving many lives!