Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Berlin!
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin,
and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order,
here we go!
Starting with you, Andy.
My fact is that pigeons make better coast guards than people.
In one specific way.
What you're saying is they can fly down and pull people out of the sea maybe?
Wouldn't that be nice?
They look good in a red swimsuit?
No, they definitely do.
So this was an experiment that was done by the United States Coast Guard in 1976.
They knew that pigeons have really good eyesight and they started training them to spot people who were lost at sea.
So the Coast Guard would fly up in a helicopter and they had a little observation bubble on the bottom of the helicopter and they put a pigeon in there and the pigeon was strapped on a special couch.
Like on a sofa?
They were on a little mini sofa.
He must have been half terrified and half very comfortable.
Yeah, and they were trained these pigeons to,
whenever they saw in the ocean below them a tiny scrap of colored fabric representing a person floating in the sea,