Using pigeons as drones

Nowadays, some birds are trained to take down pesky drones.  Back before drones became a cheap and easy way to acquire aerial imagery, a German inventor proposed using pigeons to capture photographs of the earth from above.


Curious to see where his pigeons were flying, he devised a way to capture pictures of their flight path.  In the early 1900s Julius Neubronner developed an aluminum breast harness to which a lightweight camera was attached.  The camera was equipped with a timer that would take a picture every thirty seconds.  This contraption was attached to a homing pigeon in order to capture aerial photographs. While aerial photographs taken from balloons and kites had been taken some 20-30 years earlier, the perspective of seeing the landscape from above was still a novel and exciting view for most people.  The unreliability of flight paths and quality of the aerial photographs compared to  made the pigeon aerial invention a short-lived strategy.

As eloquently noted in Popular Science Monthly, volume 88, 1872, p.30-31 :

"It is a strange medley, the air-ship, the last and most daring invention of man's brain, rising in the early dawn to search out and photograph the foe's movements, and the graceful pigeon, so frequently mentioned in the stories of early days, soaring, perhaps at the same moment, to act as an aerial scout."