I've spent what seems like weeks hanging out in my backyard, watching my young son give up computer games in favor of snuggling the now adolescent hens (he finds them soothing) and my older son happily reading on a hay bale, three chickens on his lap and another busily untying his shoelace.
I've snuggled up with my kids happily watching David Attenborough's absolutely brilliant documentary, The Life of Birds (available for instant download on Netflix!), which describes the thinking, mating, flight, and evolution of these absolutely marvelous creatures.
And I've spent hours poring the web and the scientific literature about homing pigeons after my eldest bought four white homing doves to start a dove release business, then promptly got accepted into the Peace Corps.
And what have I found in all this?
Psychology!
Well, PIGEONS and psychology. Because, it turns out, pigeons have played a big part in what we know about learning, how we structure education, how we work with children with autism, the advice we give parents, and how we understand economics.
While it's rats and their mazes that are iconically associated with mid 20th century psychology it's pigeons that served as the preferred model system for one of the foundational figures of psychology: B.F. Skinner.
B.F. Skinner and the Feathered Rat
Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner first got interested in pigeons in the late 1930's while riding a train, watching the flying hordes careen through the city sky and worrying about the oncoming Nazi invasion in Europe.
It took a genius to connect the two.
Skinner was a young professor in 1938, a newly minted Ph.D. from Harvard where he had made a key observation that shaped our field.
Pavlov had noted that stimuli caused learning through association: a bell rings, the dog drools. Skinner took this further. He noted that it's not the bell that makes the dog drool. It's what happens afterwards: the meat the dinner bell announces.
This simple - but brilliant - observation led Skinner to focus on what happens AFTER a behavior: a reward - which increases the likelihood that the behavior will occur again - or a punishment - which decreases it.
Skinner's observations of the spectacular aeronautic abilities of the common pigeon (racing pigeons have been clocked at over 100 mph) led him to believe that they might be the perfect pilot to guide missiles and defend beleaguered European cities suffering from Nazi bombardment. Computer guidance was unheard of, and electronic guidance was new and unreliable. Pilots could steer planes to take out missiles, but what the Navy needed was essentially what kamakazi pilots did - without losing human pilots.
Skinner's answer: pigeons.
Skinner's idea was simple. Train birds to keep the image of the missile right in the middle of the screen. The missile moves off center, the pigeon pecks to center it again .
It worked like a charm - at least in tests. (Click on this link to see his video of the demo.)
But it sounded crazy - and the Navy, which, along with the Kellogg Foundation, had funded the original research - laughed him out of their offices.
But that didn't stop Skinner. Pigeons were in his blood.
Skinner's work on reinforcement schedules had focused on how the type and timing of reinforcers changed whether - and how fast - people and animals learned (for an example of how he shaped behavior, click here.).
What happened when there is no relationship between what you do and what happens next? In other words, what happened when reinforcement was random?
Pigeons became superstitious.
In "Superstition'In the Pigeon(1938), Skinner fed his pigeons on a regular schedule - every 30 seconds, for example. The feeding was obvious - a light would flash, the bin made a noise, and a door would open for a few seconds with food. Reward.
Only what was rewarded?
Nothing in particular. Or nothing, that is, predetermined by the psychologst. What did the pigeon think was rewarded?
It varied from bird to bird. Skinner writes:
"One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. . . . Another bird was conditioned to make incomplete pecking or brushing movements directed toward but not touching the floor."
Skinner called it 'superstitious' behavior because the bird acted as if there was a causal relationship between their behavior (turning around) and the reward (getting food). Just like some people believe that rubbing a rabbits foot brings them luck. But the connection had been formed by pure chance.
Reinforcement and Complex Behaviors
The video below shows what can be done just with pigeons and just with simple rewards. The pigeons are playing ping pong.
Ping Pong!
(Skinner and his students started with bowling, but that was a solo activity.) Note that every time a pigeon scores a point, they get fed (that's why they duck down and stick their head in the door eveyr time their opponent misses).
That's impressive, but not as impressive as what reinforcement can do in real life - intentionally or not.
Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner first got interested in pigeons in the late 1930's while riding a train, watching the flying hordes careen through the city sky and worrying about the oncoming Nazi invasion in Europe.
In 
