Every Day Before Remembrance Day, a Pigeon Flew Down to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Staff Soon Discovered Why

In the weeks before Remembrance Day 2019, staff at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra noticed something odd. Poppies kept disappearing.

Visitors leave red poppies at the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier, in the Hall of Memory, the quietest and most solemn room in the building. Now some of those poppies were going missing, day after day.

The thief turned out to be a pigeon.

Each day it flew down to the tomb, picked up a poppy and carried it up into a corner of the mosaic-covered hall. There, beside a tall stained-glass window of a wounded Australian soldier, it was carefully building a nest out of them.

The memorial decided to let it stay. A spokesperson said the bird was “preparing for new life in a place that commemorates death, sacrifice and renewal.” The wounded soldier in the window stands for “endurance,” the memorial said, and the nest of poppies beside him was “a poignant reminder of the powerful bond between man and beast on the battlefield.”

A few weeks later, the memorial shared some more news: a baby pigeon had hatched in the nest of poppies.

It is easy to smile at a bird stealing flowers. But pigeons have a real place in that building.

In both world wars, homing pigeons carried messages when radios and telephone lines failed. Soldiers carried them in baskets to the front line, wrote notes on tiny slips of paper, rolled them into small tubes on the birds’ legs and let them go. The pigeons flew home through smoke, storms and gunfire.

In 1942, the Australian Corps of Signals set up its own pigeon service. Pigeon fanciers across the country donated thousands of birds.

One of them was a blue chequer cock known as Q879. On April 5, 1944, on Manus Island, a small American patrol was surrounded and their radio was not working. They released their pigeons one by one with calls for help. Two were shot down. Q879 got through. He flew about 48 kilometers back to his loft in 47 minutes, help was sent, and the patrol was saved.

Q879 was awarded the Dickin Medal, often called the animals’ Victoria Cross. Today he is part of the Australian War Memorial’s collection, in the same building where, 75 years later, another pigeon quietly made its home among the poppies.

Watch the story of the war pigeons above.