Hidden talents

In our county town today I  noticed these pigeons clustered around two roof lights and surmised they were taking advantage of warmth coming up from below. They're not stupid these 'sky rats'. Only this morning media reports*  announced  that pigeons have been taught to identify cancerous tumours in mammogram images by using rewards for correct diagnoses. 

"The pigeons learned in only a matter of hours to do better than random at distinguishing cancerous from noncancerous cells. And over the course of just 1 month, their accuracy rose as high as 80% -- good, but not as good as human experts. Far more impressive was the wisdom of the flock. By showing the same images to different birds and combining their guesses, the accuracy rose to 99%, on par with trained human experts and more reliable than automatic computer image analysis.

Pigeons have evolved this extraordinary visual acuity through their habit of spotting the tiniest seed or speck of food  - which is why the feral pigeon has done so well in urban environments rife with scavenging opportunities - the crumbs and flakes of food that rain from  mouths and hands and wrappers.

It's not the first time pigeons' eyes have  been put to saving human lives. In the 1970s and 80s trained birds were actually taken on US coastguard helicopters to help in search and rescue operations. Their success rate in spotting floating objects in the sea was 93% accurate compared with the 38% success rate of human observers. And they never got bored!
Sadly the project ran out of funding before it was brought into operation.. You can find out how it was done here and note the charming Project Sea Hunt poster of a pigeon wearing a coastguard cap and binoculars.


*The scientific report on pigeons as trainable observers of breast cancer images is here.

Thanks for the stars and compliments  on yesterday's. Apologies for not getting around to returning them yet.