4. A carrier pigeon and its secret message was found in a Surrey home in 2012
During the Second World War (in fact as late as 1957) the US and other armies used carrier pigeons to send messages between various units and sites. When a pigeon carrying a message from the front arrived at its coop, it would sound an alarm and the message was removed from the capsule attached to the bird’s leg and sent along via radio, messenger, or signal telegraph (semaphore). The messages were in code, and members of Signal Corps manned the coops to decode them. Of course, the enemy was well aware of the pigeon’s purpose, and attempts to shoot them down were common. Trained hawks were used to attack them. Numerous pigeons were awarded the Dickin Medal, a British award for animals for exemplary service to the military.
Another use of pigeons was communication with spies behind the enemy lines, with the birds flying directly to the spy’s contact, or handler, in the United Kingdom during the years of the war before the liberation of France. The spies often had their own, unique codes, known only to them and their contact. It was likely one such pigeon, or rather the remains of one such pigeon, which was discovered by a Surrey homeowner as he cleaned out a long disused chimney in 2012. What looked like a twig was the skeletal remains of a pigeon’s leg, with the red message canister still attached. The pigeon had been lodged in the chimney since World War II. Although some have claimed to have decoded the message privately, in 2016 the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) announced that decoding was an impossibility without access to the original source code.