I keep referring to them as Nguni of the skies but they really are a quite impressive species.

Dating back thousands of years racing / homing pigeons have worked efficiently (mostly), hand in hand with humans delivering messages , emergency medicine, stock prices, [contraband] and so much more between pigeon posts located in towns and cities across the world. (The terminus of early telegraph lines. )

By 3000 BC, Egypt was using homing pigeons for pigeon post, taking advantage of a singular quality of this bird, which when taken far from its nest is able to find its way home due to a particularly developed sense of orientation. Messages were then tied around the legs of the pigeon, which was freed and could reach its original nest.

By the 19th century homing pigeons were used extensively for military communications.

Homing pigeons were still employed in the 21st century by certain remote police departments in India to provide emergency communication services following natural disasters.

In September 2009, a South African IT company based in Durban pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a data packed 4 GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest Internet service provider, Telkom. The pigeon, Winston, took an hour and eight minutes to carry the data 80 km (50 miles). In all, the data transfer took two hours, six minutes, and fifty-seven seconds—the same amount of time it took to transfer 4% of the data over the ADSL.