By what means, do you suppose, would a person in ancient Egypt or ancient Greece send a text message to their friends to flake out on their dinner plans at the last minute?

I mean, there were no smartphones, no landlines, there was no internet, there wasn't even the telegraph.

But there were plenty of pigeons.

There were special pigeons bred for the purpose of carrying messages from one place to another. We call them homing pigeons. Before the telephone and

telegraph, a homing pigeon was sometimes the fastest way to send a message, in the form of a little

note or strip of microfilm fastened to the bird's

legs. A homing pigeon has the uncanny ability to find its way home after being displaced to some

other location, even if that location is over a thousand miles away. So let's say you've got a pigeon who was born and raised in London.

His name is Humphrey Plunkett.

You carry Humphrey with you in a cute little pigeon carrier all the way to Warsaw, Poland,

a distance of about 900 miles or 1,400 kilometers. To send a message back to London from Warsaw,

you just attach it to the bird, toss him into the sky and yell, fly home, Humphrey, fly!

And off he goes. A few days later, Humphrey arrives and the message is received. You have

successfully flaked

on your dinner plans. And you know, this gives me an idea. The next time I go backpacking in the

wilderness, I could leave the emergency GPS beacon behind and just take a homing pigeon instead.

It's a low-tech safety solution that doesn't require batteries. And bonus, I've got a little hiking

buddy riding in my pack. So if I slip and break a leg or something, I just release my pigeon

and it flaps away, all the way back to my mom's house with a note that says,

Hi, Mom, how are you? Good, I hope. Anyway, I wish I could have told you this in person,

but I would like my casket to be made of mahogany, lined with velvet preferably, and it should have

some nice gold-plated handles. And I also want a big fancy funeral. Spare no expense! P.S., please take

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