Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 June 1886 — The Carrier-Pigeon. [ARTICLE]

The Carrier-Pigeon.

The carrier, the acknowledged king of pigeons, has in its name the source of a great annoyance to its sensitive fancier. He admits for it an ancestry dating back to the message-bearers of Persian kings and Turkish sultans, and that the peculiarities of structure — the prominent wing-butts, the great muscular development which gives the full-rounded breast, the wing best adapted to speedy and long-continued flight, and the protruding eyeball peculiar to the traveling bird, all points he values for their part in the perfect symmetry —that these were all fixed in its day of usefulness as the courier of royalty. But he is careful to explain that he has counted out all useful qualities and practical values in the bird of to-day; that the points he values highest are those of development of growth, to perfect which his bird is carefully secluded from the deteriorating influences of sun and outdoor air; that the name is only applicable to it for its elegant carriage, one of its most valued and to be remarked properties; that it is only the ignorant who could confound the grand high-class bird with that little shapeless message-bearer, the homing pigeon. The carrier has always been held in the highest esteem in England. Moore, writing in 1735, tells of a fancier in Bishopsgate street who kept a silver hatchet and block with which off the heads of those condemned to death, “that being of the blood royal they ought pot to die after the manner of the common herd. ” — The Century.