Instant Messenger Pigeon

The prototype of Twitter proved to be quite reliable.

Katara: Sokka, tell me you didn't buy a bird.
Sokka: Not just a bird. A messenger bird! Now we can send messages all over the world, even to Gran-Gran.
Aang: Wow, how does it work?
Sokka: Hm, uh, I never actually thought about that. Hawky: Gran-Gran, South Pole. (he points helpfully; Hawky shakes his head in confusion) I think he gets it.

— Avatar: The Last Airbender, "The Runaway"

Before the advent of the telegraph, pigeon post was the only way to deliver messages relatively quickly over great distances. A message written on light paper could be inserted into a tube attached to the homing pigeon's leg, and it would carry it over a thousand kilometers and several days to its destination.

As useful as pigeon post proved to be during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, this method of communication possessed some considerable drawbacks. Firstly and most importantly, pigeon post is only a one-way communication device. A homing pigeon's capacity to reliably deliver messages was entirely dependent upon its ability to locate its nest and mate. Thus, the pigeons had to first be transported from their nesting location to the senders' location via slower-than-pigeon transit. Once released, the bird would fly straight to its home and not budge thereafter; for mutual conversation, both parties needed either several pigeons transported in the other's location to send home or some means of retrieving them after sending a message.^note Sometimes a pigeon could be trained to go back and forth between two locations, one counting as "home" and the other being a major food source, but moving on. Homing pigeons were also prone to getting lost or eaten by predators during particularly difficult journeys, which necessitated sending the same message with several pigeons, some or all of which could fall into the hands of a third party. Indeed, the Germans even trained falcons to do specifically this during the aforementioned siege.

In fiction, the delivery time is considerably shorter and pigeons always get the messages through. Unless you're the sort of person that wants a whole section on pigeons and having the plot grind to a halt if one dies, no-one likes the realistic version.

This trope gets its name from the concept of Instant Messaging in computing. Considering that you don't even need a computer for this to work, it's no wonder the Medieval Stasis is still in effect. For another example of animals not quite working that way, see Automaton Horses. For a Funny Animal pigeon that works as a mailman by flying from mailbox to mailbox, see Flying Postman.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Spoofed in one Crayon Shin-chan strip, which is a What If? adventure where Shin Chan and a kunoichi fights hostile ninjas in medieval Japan. After escaping a deathtrap, the kunoichi blew a whistle, and Shin Chan assumes she's calling her messenger falcon for help. Instead, cue her messenger ostrich running out from a nearby forest. Still useful as a steed giving them a ride, though.
• Played straight in Last Exile, when a messenger pigeon finds Sophia aboard a friggin' airship. Fair enough, pigeon post was occasionally used to deliver messages to ships in nearby waters and other mobile destinations, but it would have been appreciated if the pigeon were looking for the dovecote instead of, you know, Sophia.
• In Fist of the North Star, a traveler pigeon finds Falco in the middle of the Land of the Asura, located across the sea.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Stone Ocean: After retrieving Jotaro's stolen Stand disc, Jolyne contacts the Speedwagon Foundation to ask for their assistance in obtaining it from her so they can revive him. To Pucci's surprise, it was actually a pigeon sent to retrieve the disc, not a person. The pigeon was somehow able to fly from the Speedwagon headquarters to Green Dolphin St. Jail in Florida in only 20 minutes, even while going through a rain of poison dart frogs that Weather Report created.
  • Steel Ball Run: Once Gyro defeats Ringo Roadagain, Johnny realizes that Ringo had sent a carrier pigeon to Funny Valentine detailing the location of next corpse part. However, Lucy Steel manages to intercept it before Valentine could read the contents.
• One Piece has its newspaper delivered by seagulls, which can reach subscribers even if they're on a ship at sea. However, there are limits to these birds. Amazon Lily, located in the sea-monster infested Calm Belt, is too out of the way. The World Government sends out invitations to join the Seven Warlords of the Sea to pirates via bats.
• The Demon Kingdom and surrounding lands in Kyo Kara Maoh! are caught in Medieval Stasis, so naturally when Jozak needs to get a message home he uses these.
• One episode of Pokémon: The Original Series has Pidgey being used this way. This is somewhat more believable, since Pokémon are considerably more intelligent than real birds (most of them understand, but cannot speak, human langauges). The episode also acknowledged that this form of long-distance communication is dying out due to advances in technology.
• In Ore-sama Teacher, Mafuyu exchanges letters with her pen pal Ichigo Love actually Okegawa using a carrier pigeon.

Comic Books

• One issue of Conan the Barbarian has a particularly horrendous example. A mole in Conan's army was sending messages by pigeons to her employer, the enemy. Conan outwits them because, as it turns out, he's had archers intercept and shoot down the pigeon, read the message, then put the message on another pigeon and send off so the enemy wouldn't suspect anything. Gee, good thing pigeons come with standardized directions these days, yeah?
• Lucky Luke:
  • The album series, Lucky Luke vs Pinkerton, has Pinkerton using an Instant Messenger Vulture. It once delivers a help message to Luke, without any hint of where the cowboy could be. Smart bird.
  • Another had Luke asking whether the bird knew where the White House was, and noticing he still had a message attached. It read "To President Lincoln: will attack tomorrow. General Grant". The shopkeeper claims this is proof his pigeon knows where it is.
  • Yet another featured an Army experimental center, where the scientist showed a program to crossbreed pigeons and parrots, lightening the load.
• The Tintin adventure The Blue Lotus showed the villain Mitsuhirato receiving and sending messages by homing pigeon.
• Asterix
  • In Asterix and the Black Gold, the villains use a messenger-fly as a go-between.
  • Played With in Asterix and the Missing Scroll: The Romans make great use of pigeons. The narration even calls it the latest communication technology, and it’s shown to be more effective than the traditional mail, which his transported by ox-cart. However, that this technique is not exactly fault-proof becomes clear when first a pigeon carrying a message to Rome accidentally ends up on the ship of the pirates, twice a Roman accidentally releases the pigeons before they can attach the messages to them, and in the end, a pigeon delivering the message that Caesar is on his way to Amorica arrives after the fight is over and Caesar has already left again.
• Wonder Woman: The Once and Future Story: Artemis is given a messenger pigeon trained to return to Ephesus to carry her message of where the Ephesians are to attack to rescue Alcippe once she finds her mother. When she does let the bird go the Ephesian warriors and ships arrive on shore before she's finished her speech she gives while she does so to her new allies.

Fan Works

• Zig-zagged in Avengers: Infinite Wars, where twelve of the Avengers (Captain America, Black Widow, Falcon, War Machine, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Ant-Man, Wasp, Daredevil, Spider-Man and Black Panther) are displaced to the Star Wars galaxy during the Clone Wars. They eventually make contact with their home galaxy when Thor meets some of the team on Mortis, but while he can travel via the Bifrost, unusual cosmic anomalies mean that the Bifrost can only access this galaxy via Mortis, and each such transit requires considerable effort from Heimdall, with the result that Thor cannot simply travel to and from that galaxy as he wishes and the other Avengers refuse to leave until they have defeated Ultron, who has opened a third front in the Clone Wars.
• During Chapter 19 of Infinity Train: Boiling Point, Skara uses her Palisman as one of these to deliver a message to the Boiling Isles and back.
• As shown in the Anime folder, a sidestory of Pokémon Reset Bloodlines references how Flying-type Pokémon were used for delivering messages until the method died out as Technology Marches On. Falkner's father Walker specifically had them work like this before becoming a Gym Leader.

Films — Animation

• Played for laughs in Asterix and the Vikings, where Justforkix's pet pigeon Shortmessageservix is trained to send messages like a mobile phone. His coos and warbles even sound like touch-tone dialing.
  • Also played with in The Secret of the Magic Potion, where Getafix uses boars rather than a pigeon to deliver a message to the other druids.
• Dinotopia: Quest for the Ruby Sunstone (and the books it was based on) features small dino-parrots which memorize verbal messages to be sent to others on the island. Justified as the Messenger Bird are clearly sapient, and the Dimorphodon in the books probably are too.
• In Early Man, the Queen of the Bronze Age civilization corresponds with Lord Nooth using a messenger bird that recalls her words with the fidelity of a tape recorder, seems to have conversations with Nooth, and even throws things at him when she's particularly disappointed in him.
• Played straight in Valiant, though in a rare case of having done the research there actually were German predator birds chasing the pigeons.
• Parodied in The LEGO Movie, where Vitruvius sends out blue birds... to go to Internet cafes and e-mail the other Master Builders. They literally fall apart the moment he turns his back on them.
• Gulliver's Travels: King Bombo uses a cross-eyed carrier pigeon named Twinkletoes for correspondence with his spies in Lilliput.

Films — Live-Action

• The Mummy Returns featured an Instant Messenger Falcon named "Horus", used to communicate with the leaders of the Medjai. Apparently, Horus is smart enough to track down the leaders of a group of nomads, then return to a group of adventurers who are wandering all over the Middle East. The bird eventually gets shot out of the sky by The Dragon, though. It's highly exaggerated by the movie since they generally don't have to do it when the owner isn't staying in one place, but well-trained falcons can fly long distances and then return to their owner.
• Parodied in Robin Hood: Men in Tights. When the Merry Men get some info in Nottingham, they wonder how to get it to Sherwood Forest. One of them then says, "We'll fox it to them!" Followed by them attaching the message to a fox, which oddly ran off making dolphin sounds. The parody is on "We'll fax it to them!", as fax machines were enormously popular then. The dolphin warbling is possibly a fax modem parody too.
• In The Great Race reporter Maggie DuBois uses homing pigeons to deliver her stories to the newspaper sponsoring the race. The pigeons return directly to the newspaper building, not their dovecots, and reach it almost immediately even though they're crossing most of the U.S. to get there.
• In Top Secret! the traitor Nigel uses homing pigeons to send messages to the East German government. Played for laughs, as the pigeons are shown wearing aviator's helmets.
• In Desperate Journey, a Polish saboteur behind Nazi lines blows up a bridge on the pre-war border between Germany and Poland. He then sends a pigeon back to England with his report. How a Polish saboteur behind enemy lines got ahold of an English pigeon is not explained.
• Played realistically in the 1922 Robin Hood, with a pigeon as a one-way communication device from Robin Hood, off on Crusade, to Maid Marian back in England. Marian had to send her outbound message to Robin via human courier.
• Sons O' Guns: Pierre, Yvonne's stepfather, is shown concealing some birds in a fake accordion. They're messenger pigeons which he is using to send intelligence to the Germans. When Jimmy finds the pigeon coop, and sets the pigeons free because they are disturbing his sleep, he is arrested and charged with espionage.
• The House of Rothschild: Eventually it's revealed that this is how Nathan is getting early intelligence about how the army's doing in France. He has people send him messages from the front by homing pigeon.
• A Town of Love and Hope: An unusual spin on this trope. Masao, a poor boy who lives in a slum in postwar Tokyo, isn't using homing pigeons to send messages. Instead, he runs a penny-ante scam where he sells the pigeons as pets. Whenever careless owners eventually let the pigeons out, Masao simply collects them from their nest near his home, and sells them again.

Gamebooks

• Fighting Fantasy:
  • Nearly halfway through Return to Firetop Mountain, while you're on a boat, your friend Moose will send a messenger pigeon to deliver you a message that your quest has been compromised, and that a ghostly Doppelganger assassin will be waiting to ambush you later on. You'll need to pass a Luck Test, though - if you fail, a nighthawk suddenly attacks the pigeon and snatches it back to it's nest, and thus you missed the message.
  • The third Sorcery! adventure, The Seven Serpents, have you receiving an important letter of warning from a Golden Eagle, the pet of the Analand Royal Court, which warns you of the titular seven serpents in the Baklands ready to ambush you at various points, which you'll need to kill to succeed.

Literature

• Discworld:
  • Monstrous Regiment appears to use messenger pigeons properly. They are sent over short distances from a traveling remote reporter to the Ankh-Morpork Times stationary base in Borogravia. The birds are frequently waylaid (especially by the Morporkian military) and long-distance and two-way communication is handled exclusively by semaphore telegraph.
  • Previous books, however, have explained that Ankh-Morporkian pigeons can be trained for two-way traffic. Apparently they're brighter than regular pigeons, although Commander Vimes says there are types of fungus brighter than regular pigeons, which tend to get eaten by Ankh-Morpork's gargoyle population, introducing selection pressure for intelligence. The pigeons used by the Watch can seek out a specific officer, regardless of where he is.
  • Note that some thieves in The Colour of Magic used a "homing rat" to send a message. It's unclear if this is a regular rat trained to track the recipient down by smell, a magic-enhanced rat as per above, or even some fantastical species of rodent, unique to the Disc, that shares pigeons' homing instincts.
  • As seen in Interesting Times, the Pointless Albatross can evidently be trained to carry messages between distant continents.
• Harry Potter:
  • Probably justified, as the owls could very easily be enchanted or supernaturally bred. There have also been cases of mail being stolen.
  • Also averted in the Ministry of Magic, where messages from one department to another took the form of paper airplanes.
    Mr. Weasley: We used to use owls, but the mess was terrible. You can imagine the droppings...
  • Harry's owl, Hedwig, is described as being particularly good at this, to the point where she never requires an address to deliver a letter. Hedwig has even managed to deliver a letter to a magically hidden location that can't be found without being told where it is by a specific person. Somewhat justified, as it's been established that wards don't always work on non-wizards. For example, house elves can apparate through anti-apparition charms.
  • Semi-Averted with Ron's owl. As he would get the message to where it needs to go, just not without crashing into something.
  • The Order of the Phoenix, not trusting the security of owl post in wartime, uses the Patronus charm to dispatch supernatural animal messengers to one another.
• The Reynard Cycle: Count Bricemer receives at least one message this way during The Baron of Maleperduys. Reynard has a far more useful asset in Tiecelin's winged Chimera brood. Not only can they deliver letters, they can talk.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Ravens serve as the Westerosi equivalent of pigeons. Although they can only reach established outposts like Riverrun or Castle Black, they're still uncannily quick and unerring about it. Martin has admitted the ravens are a product of Rule of Cool. (Real Life ravens are very smart birds, mind, but pigeons have them beat on directions.) Downplayed in that messenger ravens are shot down regularly by everyone, including people who just want to eat them. The majority of ravens also suffer from the same single-destination limitations as real-life messenger pigeons; a few are smart enough to go back and forth between two set locations, but these are rare and greatly prized, and perhaps once a century one is hatched that can move between three to five locations on command. There are in-universe claims that the modern messenger ravens are the result of the loss of magical knowledge; when the practice started they relayed the messages verbally.^note Real-world and Westerosi ravens both can mimic human words and sentences, but obviously getting them to say the right thing at the right time in the right place to someone that doesn't know what the raven is meant to say is something else.
• The Wizard Derk, in Dark Lord of Derkholm and Year of the Griffin by Diana Wynne Jones, breeds very clever pigeons, who are smart enough to know where people are and are very devoted to getting there.
• Used rather straight, but justified, in Hell's Gate by David Weber and Linda Evans. The messenger birds are super-fast, can be set to any destination, and are quite unlikely to be intercepted — but they're not pigeons, they're giant hummingbirds enhanced by powerful magic to be perfect for their role. And they do move at finite speed, which is Arcana's major disadvantage against their opponents (who must make do with mundane technology instead of magic, but do have telepaths).
• Used and justified in almost exactly the same form as above in the Heralds of Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey. Mages occasionally send hummingbird messengers; again, their speed and flexible addressing is chalked up to magical enhancement.
  • In The Black Gryphon Urtho's camp is host to a great number of "messenger birds" who appear to be like small parrots. They can act as recording devices or spies, recite messages, find locations, and associate faces with names. They seem to be only useful in the camp - they aren't terribly strong fliers, they are brightly colored and noisy, and they can choose not to give a message to someone they know won't feed or tickle them as they like.
  • One of the mercenary scouts in Oathbreakers uses messenger birds (presumably a different species) over short distances; it's a quick way to report back to camp while out scouting.
• In the story Count Beet, the captive princess distracts the Count (by telling him to count his stock of beets, which is a serious plot point and provides the Count with his eventual name), and sends out, in succession, three tiny creatures with a message for the prince who's trying to find her. The creatures include a honeybee and possibly a bird (can't recall). Two of them get eaten, and finally the third manages to slip past security and find the Prince. Of course, this is a fairy tale, so the bug is actively looking for the guy and has enough intelligence to locate him.
• Well averted in Stephen Donaldson's novel, The Mirror of Her Dreams, wherein Terisa Morgan, the protagonist from Earth, desperately lectures her Fantasy World interrogator on the limitations of Earth homing pigeons (one-way communication, not two-way); he's never heard of them and suspects her of using pigeons to pass messages, even though SHE alerted HIM to the method. Unfortunately, the only person around who could corroborate this is the Big Bad (who did, indeed, get the idea and the pigeons from Earth, but is unlikely to speak up for her).
• The Rain Wilds Chronicles, part of the Realm of the Elderlings sequence, has a framing story told via letters between two pigeon handlers. Here, the concept was handled pretty well. The pigeons are used by a pair of interdependent cities to communicate, and are sent to various coops by boat. The pigeon handlers get reprimanded at one point for using such an expensive system for personal letters, and important letters are sent with several pigeons.
• Dragonriders of Pern has the fire lizards, which are especially useful for this due to the fact that they can teleport.
• In The Bride Wore Black Leather, ravens bearing messages keep turning up in John Taylor's office, despite its lack of a window. Subverted in that his secretary Cathy thinks it's cruel to use birds this way, so refuses to answer the messages until the spells that compel the ravens have expired, at which point she finds them good homes.
• Safehold has messenger wyverns, which are usually bigger and stronger then pigeons (at least some of them can carry small packages). It's also mentioned that they were deliberately genetically engineered by the terraforming crew, and they do have finite speed and the single-direction restriction, though they can be trained to imprint on a new "home base", unlike homing pigeons.
• Kel's sparrows in Protector of the Small are often sent to try and find people and bring them back sometimes. It's once proposed that she carry paper and ink so they could carry messages, but this isn't followed up on. This is justified because the sparrows are both unusually intelligent thanks to Daine the Wildmage and Kel never sends them as far away as a messenger pigeon would go—usually just elsewhere around the camp, village, or battlefield.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: There's a spell called ordonnanz that changes feystones into magical birds that can record a voice message. The bird is then almost instantly sent to a recepient to whom it repeats the message three times before reverting into a feystone to which the recepient can apply the same spell to give their answer. There has been at least one case on the spell being applied to a paper letter, in which case the bird is pretty much a traveling form for the letter. It seems to be useful when only one of the people involved can use the spell, as a piece of blank paper enchanted to turn into a bird in response to physical indication that the letter is finished can be sent alongside the initial message.
• Les Voyageurs Sans Souci: Messenger pigeons are used by the queen of the birds to carry messages and spread news around her realm. The pigeon Mirliflore can easily remember dozens of messages and find their recipients whenever they live. Mirliflore also has an uncanny knack to run into the main characters, even accidentally, when he needs to transmit a message to them.
• Technomagia i smoki has explicitly magical thunder dragons - small, bright blue flying dragons that carry messages.
• The Search for Delicious: During Gaylen's quest, he and the Prime Minister communicate by tying messages to the Prime Minister's cockatoo's leg. The cockatoo can always find Gaylen, no matter where he is.

Live-Action TV

• 'Allo 'Allo! used a "long-distance duck". Of course, it's dubious as to whether the duck even made it out of the town. Actual messengers pigeons end up eaten at one point.
• Played with in Blackadder Goes Forth. Blackadder kills a messenger pigeon and eats it to remove any evidence of receiving suicidal orders, in order to have a plausible explanation for not following them. Unfortunately for him, General Melchett is personally familiar with the pigeon, and is able to recognize its remaining feather — and the message it was carrying was an announcement that shooting messenger pigeons has been made a capital offense due to the number of orders not getting through.
  • Played straight in the first series, when Prince Edmund buys some black homing pigeons (and one black rooster) to summon his men to overthrow the kingdom. Every bird delivers its message, even the rooster.
• Game of Thrones seems to go back and forth with this trope. In the earlier episodes, messenger ravens seemed to able to come and go at amazingly fast speeds. However, this is averted when Robb sets up camp outside of The Twins, where he has his men shoot down every Raven the Freys attempt to send out to keep them from warning the Lannisters of their presence. This trope is actually more an effect of the show's tendency to ignore time. The world's Bizarre Seasons mean that there's no change in weather over the year-long time-span of a 10-episode season, which coupled with the absence of a formal calendar, has the effect of allowing the show to cut past weeks at a time of characters traveling from one place to another or waiting for a raven to show up with a message.
• Gilligan's Island had an episode where a homing pigeon landed on the island. They corresponded with a guy on the mainland named "Birdie" via the pigeon a few times. The episode ends with the castaways sending a picture of them on the island to convince him of their plight, but the man turns out to be in jail and when he gets paroled, he releases all of his pigeons without reading the last message from them.
• Done on Jack of All Trades, but with a talking parrot.
• Parodied in The Monkees episode "Monkee See, Monkee Die". The boys are fogged in a haunted mansion and talk about using a homing pigeon to get a message out, and one conveniently lands on the windowsill. The note on its leg says "please don't attach notes to my leg, I am not a carrier pigeon."
• Used a little more realistically in the Pushing Daisies episode "Pigeon", since the bird in question only had to travel back and forth between two locations. Except the bird presumably nested in one location and thus flew there, was given a note, and... flew back to where it had been. They were in theory using one single bird to communicate over the course of years. The bird had one of its wings replaced by a stuffed parrot's wing that was attached with a bejeweled harness. Where it nested was the least of its problems.
• The secret agents of The Wild Wild West have at least four over the course of the series - Henry, Henrietta, Annabella, and Arabella. Artemus Gordon likes to warn them against stopping and talking to hawks.
• Happens Once an Episode on Zoboomafoo when a different messenger bird brings in a message from the Animal Helpers.

Tabletop Games

• In Dungeons & Dragons there exists a spell called animal messenger. This spell enables the caster to target any tiny sized animal (i.e. cat, rat, pigeon, hawk, squirrel, etc.) to deliver a message to a mentally imprinted destination and tames the animal to allow a small message or token to be attached to it. The animal then waits in the specified destination for the remainder of the spell for someone to take the message. However, this spell is rarely used, as it has no guarantee that the animal finds its way, survives the journey, or that the person who gets the message is the intended receiver.

Video Games

• White Knight Chronicles features an interesting take on the trope. Bigelows, cute, intelligent, owl-like birds, work like homing pigeons to deliver messages over long distances. The trick is that a pair of bigelows (presumably mates) can telepathically transmit messages and images between one another in real time. So while they still need to fly to and from their destinations, the messages they relay literally are instant. The bird's eyes project a grey-scale 3D hologram complete with sound, in a way that seems suspiciously familiar.
• In Final Fantasy VI, it's implied that a pigeon could reach a brand-new, secret military base without much effort, and carrying silk bouquets from an obscure cave in the mountains and returning is downright overt.
• Star Ocean: In the first and second games for the SNES, party members could learn to use messenger pigeons to deliver a shopping list and required money to a store. No matter where the party was, the bird would always return with the requested items, whether the party was in a forest, in a cave, or in another dimension! Foiled if you are missing the appropriate perk/attribute/etc. Have a different character send the bird if this happens. The second game had it as well.
• Genesis LPMud, as a fantasy RPG, could get away with this. And then Instant Messenger Spiders were implemented for the Drow to send quick communications underground. And then the goblinoids got Instant Messenger Slave Children. Like the pigeons and spiders, the slave children could optionally be killed and eaten by the message recipient.
• Grand Theft Auto: One caller to Chatterbox who is the head of an organization trying to get people to stop using phones, says that the group has had to resort to homing pigeons, who keep disappearing. Later on a redneck calls in saying that pigeons make a good meal, and sometimes they "come with notes attached, just like a fortune cookie with wings."
• Done in Mother 3 with Hinawa's letter to Flint; the pigeon is even patiently sleeping outside Flint's door when he gets to it. This is probably too brief a moment to be classified definitively as either being played straight or averted; that pigeon doesn't have to fly far, is only seen once, and given the distance takes kind of a while to get there. Another messenger pigeon is seen later in the game, but we never see it reach its destination (and given that the non-plot-critical nature of the message, it doesn't matter tremendously either way.)
• The Sims:
  • MySims Kingdom has a pigeon that works opposite to real life; no matter where in the world you and your friends are, it will find you with messages from the King and then return home.
  • The Sims Medieval has a pigeon mailbox that acts pretty much the same as a normal mailbox/telephone in The Sims. For example, if your monarch sends a pigeon-delivered invite to foreign dignitaries, they will be on the castle doorstep within the hour.
• In Eternal Sonata, Claves sends a dove to Baroque to deliver the message to Prince Crescendo that Princess Serenade is a Forte spy. Not only does the dove make it safely, but it survives the bitter cold to land neatly upon Crescendo's window. The dove passes over Polka and company on its way. Polka remarks that it's strange to see a dove flying over a snowy mountain.
• In the Assassin's Creed series, this is played pretty straight, as Al-Mualim sends pigeons to the various assassin bureaus (which is also where the feathers come from), and Ezio receives messages from these as plot points and for side missions in an area.
• Understandable in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, where the pigeon is being sent from the house of Piers's uncle to another character's home in Lemuria; there are so few people around, and Piers, Lunpa, and King Hydros all seem to be close enough that it's believable they'd have pigeon contacts for each other. There is no excuse in Dark Dawn for Isaac to be sending Kraden's own pigeon back to him, after Kraden sent it to Goma Plateau with a message for Isaac, especially since Kraden was traveling at the time. He later sends it to take a message to Piers, even though Piers is also traveling. Lampshaded when Tyrell mentions he wouldn't know where to find Piers.
• In Suikoden IV, the Gaien Marine Knights Academy keeps several messenger birds for communicating with other islands. According to the game map, there aren't too many places for the poor things to land during their flights back and forth... Not that it matters much, given that the whole flock gets slaughtered shortly before a surprise attack. Mister Ramada also has a pet hawk that can act as a messenger. The final war sequence and the climax of the game is kicked off by it delivering a vital message, requiring it to find a ship somewhere in the middle of the ocean while injured severely enough for it to die immediately after delivery.
• Pokémon: Bird-Types are used for this all over the franchise. This is more justified than some examples because Flying-types are much tougher than actual pigeons, and are also fully sapient and understand human speech. Subverted in Pokémon Gold and Silver. A guy near Goldenrod City asks the Player Character to deliver a message to his friend near Violet City. He loans you a Spearow that doesn't know Fly, so it apparently can't deliver the message itself.
• In Thief (2014), Basso uses a messenger pigeon named Jenivere to send messages to Garret's clock tower hideout. Played more realistically in that it's only flying within the confines of a single city.
• In the first No More Heroes, Sylvia has gone into hiding and sends Travis his next contract through "Snail mail", which turns out to be a carrier pigeon flying through his window like a brick while sounding like a jet plane for no reason.
• Grim Fandango has pigeons that behave normally, except for being entirely skeletal. When La Résistance gets a hold of some eggs and trains them from birth, they find that the pigeons have the ability to track down any person based only on a photograph. This allows them to get messages to agents anywhere in the field from their headquarters.
• Leliana has a virtual fleet of messenger crows in Dragon Age: Inquisition. They are extremely reliable and almost frighteningly loyal to her; one of her own scouts wonders if she uses blood magic to tame them.
• Done with messenger parrots in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, which track down your ship after certain plot events — no matter where it is, in port or at sea.
• In Battlefield 1, the homing pigeon is basically a sentient unmanned drone, with the ability to precisely send the required message in one of the story mission, and subject to a multiplayer game mode where successful message delivery equals artillery strike to your enemy.

Web Comics

• In The Adventures of Shan Shan, the messenger is a bird. Presumably magic, thereby evading most of the problems.
• Spoofed in this Cyanide and Happiness comic.
• Related: In Girl Genius, Agatha tries to send out several little propeller clanks — smart enough to take orders and make escape plans — to send a message to someone, and three of them are destroyed before ever making it off the castle grounds by one of the Geisterdamen's many albino beasties. One escapes to be found by British intelligence, a third party at that point uninvolved in the conflict, but it's diverted by a secret society before it makes contact with anyone with the authority to intervene, taking some thirteen years of regular updates to come back into play.
• In Strays, Feral gets a messenger hawk. Which can, apparently, track him down personally, since he's on the move.

Web Original

• The Fate of Paul Twister has messenger pigeons specially bred by wizards so they have the ability to teleport.
• How to Hero frequently mentions carrier pigeons as a viable form of contacting other people. At one point, the author of the guide muses that if he had a carrier pigeon he would name it Carry the Pigeon. Carry would then go on to appear in a few other entries.
• Pirates SMP: There have been jokes about direct messages between players in the in-game chat manifesting as carrier pigeons, which naturally results in "carrier pigeons" being able to deliver messages in mere moments, even when the two players are miles away.

Western Animation

• In Amphibia, Marcy would use a big hornet to carry a message and deliver it to King Andrias.
• Played completely straight in Avatar: The Last Airbender, episode "The Blue Spirit", in which despite the fact that Commander Zhao is visiting someone else's command, the messenger hawk flies directly to him. And at exactly the right plot-appropriate moment. Smart hawks.
• Played (almost) straight in Hanna-Barbera's Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Yankee Doodle Pigeon was pursued by Dick Dastardly and crew.
• The "Dinosaurs A to Z" arc in Dinosaur Train is about Tiny and Buddy trying to gather all the dinosaurs in the titular Alphabet Song. They ask Elliot Enantiornithine and Arlene Archaeopteryx to spread the word around the Cretaceous and Jurassic, respectively, and they travel faster than the Dinosaur Train even though Arlene isn't very good at flying.
• Dragons: Riders of Berk: Hiccup and Fishlegs successfully train some Terrible Terrors to deliver messages. There was some in-universe doubt that it would work, but the message gets delivered right before it would be too late for the backup it sent for to come help.
• The Owl House: The Boiling Isles uses Messenger Crows, which instead of delivering paper messages, sends phone calls to the intended recipient, who can pick them up and talk into them. They’re also strong enough that the sender can instruct them to deliver the recipient to themselves.
• Justified (in a sense) in Rocky and Bullwinkle. Boris needs to get a message to HQ, which is an inconvenient trip across the ocean away. Since he can't reach his radio, he instead writes a message and sends it via a messenger pigeon — a messenger pigeon with a jet engine attached to its back.
• The Looney Tunes Wartime Cartoon "Plane Daffy" features a squadron of messenger pigeons whose ranks are being decimated by Axis spy pigeon Hata Mari.
• In the Hercules: The Animated Series episode "Hercules and the Techno Greeks", when Hercules is appointed the defender of Abacus Valley, he gets a little bird that will seek him out and attract his attention whenever the valley needs defending (or the inhabitants are freaking out over nothing), which he calls his beeper.
• War Is Over! has a messenger pigeon that is particularly gifted because it can go to three destinations: between the lines of two armies in trench warfare, as soldiers on the two sides play chess, and back to the headquarters of one of the two armies.

Real Life

• Truth in Television, at least in South Africa. According to this article, a homing pigeon beat the main Internet provider in delivering 4 GB of data.
  • The Australian TV show Hungry Beast tested this too. The pigeon won.
  • Heck, in any country, DSL or bottom-tier cable Internet would take longer than that pigeon to deliver 4GB, especially if the sender is also a client with a home connection (which usually cap uploads at a much lower speed than downloads). The real embarrassment was how much the pigeon beat the South African Internet by (it was still sitting at 2% when the pigeon arrived).
  • This is a concept known as a sneakernet. It's almost universally faster due to the relatively high density of storage versus network speeds. While it's commonly seen as a trivial exercise, in high-security applications or where massive amounts of data are involved, data couriers are used. As computer scientist and writer Andrew Tanenbaum puts it in his books on computer networks, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tape drives hurtling down the highway."
    • Google uses sneakernets to transfer data, in come cases into the petabyte (~1,000,000 gigabytes) range, and many military and high-security commercial systems utilize an air-gap (physically disconnected) where updates and data output have to be transferred by physically moving data storage. Amazon offers a 100 petabyte truck as a regular service.
• As a matter of fact, homing pigeons have been used as early as the days of Cyrus the Great. As The Other Wiki points out, pigeons were also used by Julius Caesar during the Gallic Wars.

Aversions

Anime & Manga

• Averted in Buddha, where Naradatta convinces Tatta to possess an animal in a desperate attempt to contact his mentor, Asita. In between third-party interceptions, exhaustion, and being attacked by predators, Tatta possesses several animals and ends up killing nearly all of them. When Asita finally gets the message, his first reaction is to severely punish Naradatta for being so reckless with the lives of animals.
• Naruto averted this trope, by actually having the pigeon taking several days to reach its destination. One would wonder why they didn't just send an IM.

Films — Live-Action

• Averted in The Lost Battalion. Every time the titular battalion tries to send a messenger pigeon back to headquarters, the Germans quickly shoot them down. It's only through sheer luck that they manage to get one through the German lines. In Real Life the pigeon that made it back (the third) was shot three times and lost an eye and a leg. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre for her service.
• Averted in The Mouse on the Moon, a sequel to The Mouse That Roared. At one point, a British spy tries to send a message from Grand Fenwick to London using one of Grand Fenwick's messenger pigeons. He attaches the message to the pigeon's leg and tells it to fly to London, but it immediately goes back to its cage.

Literature

• Averted in James Clavell's Shogun: A daimyo will send several pigeons at once to ensure that a message gets through, and a rival daimyo will try to intercept them with archers or specially-trained hawks.
• Averted to some extent in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. Few details are given, but messenger birds do seem to get eaten or intercepted on a regular basis. Meanwhile, the dark side uses ravens and rats as both spies and messengers, but they seem to be imbued with some special intelligence by the forces of evil.
• The Swallows and Amazons novel Pigeon Post is naturally partly about this. The kids have three pigeons, but one of them is unreliable and often takes two days to reach home via a meandering route rather than going straight there, so they don't use it...until the end, when they have to alert their parents of an emergency, and of course that time it flies straight and true.
• Sword of the Rightful King averts this. Morgause's spy has pigeons brought from Orkney in a cage and releases three to deliver a single message. Of the three messenger pigeons, only one makes it back to Morgause and expires shortly after because of the long, arduous journey.

Live-Action TV

• Averted to the point of inversion in one episode of the French comedic series Kaamelott. The Knights of the Round Table use pigeons to send important messages, but the birds seem to take their time and sometimes the messages are several months old, causing great confusion. Pondering about this, King Arthur finally concludes that "our pigeons are just dumb..."
• The new BBC Robin Hood, not normally noted for realism, got homing pigeons pretty much right in the episode "Lardner's Ring". The fact that a given pigeon always flies to one destination is clearly explained (as is the fact that the destination is the pigeon's nest and mate, leading one of the characters to produce a soppy metaphor about True Love in a later episode), and the villains try to bring the pigeon down with arrows and a hunting hawk. (The natural hazards are somewhat underplayed, however: it's more or less implied that once the pigeon is out of range of the villains, it's home free.) Though the pigeon never does seem to get to King Richard, and eventually the outlaws go to the King themselves. The reason for that is the fact that, by the time the pigeon returns home, the city is once again in Saladin's hands.
• The Prisoner (1967) episode "Hammer into Anvil" has Number Six catching a pigeon, fastening a note to its leg, and letting it fly. It wouldn't work to send a message and it wasn't intended to - #6 was playing mind games with #2 pretending to be investigating Village security.

Manhua

• Parodied in one Old Master Q strip where the titular character tries sending an excessively thick love letter (more like a love novel) to Miss Chan, with his parrot as the messenger. It ends up being too heavy resulting in the parrot comically falling down.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer: The Empire uses pigeons as weapons (like a messenger but with bombs), however if there is a change, it will completely miss its target or just go right back to its master… Truth in Television: the Russians used this little trick in The Crimean War, training pigeons to associate men in red coats with food, then attaching a grenade to them and releasing them near British regiments.

Video Games

• In the Infocom Interactive Fiction game Sherlock Holmes and the Riddle of the Crown Jewels, at one point you have to rent a messenger pigeon. Said pigeon is only interested in shiny objects of a certain color, and furthermore only returns to its owner when released.
• Several Worms games have an exploding pigeon as a homing missile that's slightly prone to exploding on any unfortunately-placed terrain.
• The old Bullfrog strategy game Powermonger had you communicate with your generals by messenger pigeon. It took longer the farther away they were and you could, if bored, watch the bird's flight as it went across country. The birds were pretty reliable although if they flew over an enemy army the soldiers would take potshots at them.

Web Comics

• The Order of the Stick: Vaarsuvius develops the spell "Greater Animal Messenger": it sends three messenger birds that can't deviate from the path or be affected by illusions, and would verbally repeat a message once they got within five feet of their target. Vaarsuvius made it clear that the absurd amount of time and lost sleep has assured success. The birds are, of course, shot down with arrows and eaten by their intended recipients. Earlier averted when Vaarsuvius's familiar (a raven) is being utilized to transmit information on a bandit camp instantly to Vaarsuvius. Unfortunately, the bandits hit it with a thousand arrows the moment it flies over (to Haley's exasperated cry "Oh come on! Thousands of birds must fly over every day!")
• Dominic Deegan does it without the pigeon.
• Tales of the Questor averts it. The first time, the bird gets eaten by a hawk, the second time, a bird refuses to go out into cold weather. Third time, they send back a mechanical bird — which ends its flight by diving through a window and concussing him. In these cases some of the other aspects of the trope are justified by use of magic; in fact, in the first example, our hero simply writes a new, much shorter message and sends the hawk.
• Archipelago gives us "poot owls," bird-shaped magical messengers which presumably function much better than an ordinary pigeon but are capable of being intercepted or destroyed by enemy magic, as shown here.

Western Animation

• The Goodfeathers spend some time as one of these in an episode of Animaniacs. Turns out they're not that good at it. Oddly, a German fighter pilot was able to try to shoot them down. They eventually make it to the destination after at one point figuring that walking would be safer. They're too late with the message, anyway.
• Lampshaded in the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Runaway", when Sokka purchases a Messenger Hawk only to discover it didn't come with a manual. Telling it to take a message to "Gran-Gran, South Pole" doesn't help, though by the end of the episode it seems to have developed a magical GPS service for Toph's parents, though they at least live in a town and not the south pole. To be fair, there hasn't been any evidence yet that Hawky actually successfully delivered the message. Also subverted two episodes earlier when another Messenger Hawk was intercepted by a trained eagle/vulture-like bird and the message is destroyed. There was also an instance where someone falsely claimed to have sent a message and the person they were talking to was perfectly willing to believe it had been lost, so they said next time they'll send two.
• The Venture Brothers utilized an aversion of this with a messenger butterfly. The Monarch tries to send a covert message to his henchmen while in prison on the wing of a butterfly, which is immediately intercepted and eaten by a one Mr. Tiny Eagle.
• The Loud House: In the episode "Fandom Pains", Lucy and the Morticians Club members use messenger bats to send their protest letters and the petition to get the character Tristan removed from The Vampires of Melancholia to the studio. However, since their demands are not met, it's likely the bats never made it there.

Real Life

• The Internet Engineering Task Force often publishes spoof standards documents on April Fool's Day. One of these was "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", i.e., a document proposing a standardized way to send Internet traffic via homing pigeon. In 2001, a group in Norway tried it out and determined that it had severe problems with latency and packet loss.
  • To put it into perspective, a single webpage could be loaded in one forth-and-back transmission (though that would require bad programming practice from the website if it's got any styling or interactivity at all), as long as it doesn't have any image (even in the background) or any applet. Each image would take another forth-and-back transmission, and some applets quite a few. And if the size of a packet happened to be more than the size of a message a pigeon can carry, that would mean yet another back transmission. So indeed, it's not feasible for the Internet.
  • However, since SD cards and the like can store a lot of data in a very small physical size, pigeons could carry the whole of the data faster than the Internet (as in, with actual wires) can. Doing so using human methods of transportation (couriers, postal service, etc.) is the basis of "Sneakernet" communication, and for very large (or very sensitive) batches of data, can easily be much faster than broadband. That said, it's much easier to tell a human courier where to take a message than it is to do with a bird.
• Perhaps referenced, intentionally or not, by the IM client formerly known as gAIM, now Pidgin. The name is both a reference to this trope (their client logo is in fact a purple pigeon) and the linguistics term "pidgin", a proto-language consisting of mixed vocabulary and grammar from multiple languages used in the same place/time. As a name for an IM client capable of connecting simultaneously to multiple IM protocols, it makes perfect sense.
• Several messenger pigeons were carried across the English Channel during the D-Day invasion by war correspondents. After Reuters reporter Charles Lynch let his birds go, carrying his reports of the action, most of them flew in the wrong direction — inland "towards" Germany. He cursed them for being traitors, but they ignored him.

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