This underrated animal has saved countless American soldiers, they were the email of their era, and they can perform as well as doctors, art teachers, and undergraduates after basic training. Come learn about one of the most underestimated animals on earth on this episode of Species.
Summary
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | World War I, September 1918, Northern France. |
| 0:05.8 | A group of 200 American soldiers are trapped on a hill in a depression in the dirt, surrounded by Germans. |
| 0:13.1 | Yesterday, there were 500 of them. |
| 0:15.7 | And there's no time to mourn the 300 friends and brothers lost in the past 24 hours. |
| 0:23.0 | German soldiers are on all sides, applying maximum pressure. And to make matters worse, |
| 0:30.2 | American allies have no idea they're there. And so these soldiers are being hit with artillery |
| 0:37.3 | fire from their own side. They are facing a |
| 0:41.6 | full attack from both allied and central powers. It's a nightmare. With the technology available to them, |
| 0:50.2 | there's only one way to tell their allies that they're alive, need help, and need the other |
| 0:56.8 | Americans to stop killing them with friendly fire. They need to send out a messenger bird. |
| 1:03.5 | They prepare a message, desperate, begging for cessation, attach it to one of their birds, |
| 1:10.5 | and send them out. The bird is, tragically, |
| 1:15.6 | shot and killed. They repeat this painstaking process again, and once again, their bird is shot |
| 1:23.8 | out of the sky by the Germans. They don't give up. |
| 1:28.2 | They prepare the message yet again with a final bird, |
| 1:31.8 | and the message reads as follows, quote, |
| 1:35.3 | We're along the road parallel to 276.4. |
| 1:38.4 | Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. |
| 1:43.6 | For heaven's sake, stop it. End quote. |
| 1:47.1 | Once again, they send a bird up. Once again, the bird is shot. But this bird keeps flying. |
| 1:56.9 | For 25 minutes, she is deliberately shot at by German marksmen as she ducks, dives, and |
| 2:03.7 | weaves across 25 miles back to Allied lines. Somehow, by a miracle, she makes it home. She'd been |
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