You know, a while back all the messages were sent using birds. It's not like you could tell it to deliver the message and it would find the place.
If you knew you were going to war or on a long trip and needed to communicate with a certain place, you would take pigeons from a dovecote at that certain place with you on your trip. Pigeons could then be released whenever the traveler needed to communicate with that place. Obviously, the downfall to this was that you had to know ahead of time who you needed to contact and had to take some of the pigeons from their dovecote ahead of time. However, sometimes you could train a pigeon to fly between two specific points and thereby establish constant communications between those places. Like if you had a friend in Portland and you lived in Seattle, it would constantly travel back and forth bearing messages. (I use these as an example, but obviously those two cities were never big on pigeon post, as it was mostly an Old World occurrence) .
As a side note, pigeons could carry up to 2.5 oz packages on their back and sometimes carried medications, though obviously they most often carried small papers on their legs to prevent fatigue.
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Also, there are still people who race pigeons by carrying their birds far from home, releasing them, and recording the time it takes for them to return.
All of what Caitlin stated is exactly true! We recently did a homing pigeon study where we released pigeons certain distances away from their colony. However, the further the pigeons were from their colony, the less likely they were able to return. As in migratory birds, messenger/homing doves and pigeons have an internal magnet that they use to orient themselves (this is how many birds can travel at night). Hope this helps!
