

r ^ 



THE SPEED OF THE PIGEON-POST 89 



experiment. The former made a record of 38 miles 

 an hour, and the partridges, when well on the wing, of 

 32 miles. 



The correspondents of the Field have endeavoured 

 to settle the question of the speed of birds solely by 

 observation. In the absence of any mechanical aids 

 such observations are most difficult to make, and in the 

 nature of things they fall short of the certainty which 

 would be desirable. The chief value of such contri- 

 butions to the discussion is that up to the present date 

 first-hand observations of any kind are scarce, meagre, 

 and contradictory. Everyone has been struck by the 

 phenomena of flight ; almost no one has found time to 

 take the necessary thought and trouble to collect data 

 on a subject so uncertain and elusive. When M. Marey 

 published his monumental work, ' Le Vol des Oiseaux,' 

 in 1890, such records as he was able to collect, though 

 eminently suggestive, were only calculated to give 

 uncertain notions ; moreover, the conclusions of dif- 

 ferent writers did not agree. M. Van Roosebeck, a 

 leading Belgian pigeon-flyer, assigned to homing pigeons 

 a maximum speed of from 100 to 120 miles an hour. 

 Wilbers quoted a case of a pigeon which had flown 

 nearly 20 miles in as many minutes. Here is a 

 difference of one half between two authorities. One of 

 the standard references was an observed flight of pigeons 

 from Paris to Spa, at the rate of 50 miles an hour. 



