The pigeon loft was built by the wayside in the residential area of Jakarta

As I walked through the residential area in Jakarta, I came to some boxes piled up on the side of the road. Each box had a window-like hole in it, and in front of the hole was the owner of the box. A pigeon. Each of the little boxes was a pigeon house. It seemed that there was a pigeon lover here who kept a number of pigeons. The owner might be taking part in a pigeon race.

A pigeon race is a race that exploits the homing instinct of pigeons and uses so-called messenger pigeons. Pigeons are released at a distance and the speed at which they return to the nest is the most important factor in the race. The pigeons' nesting instinct is so strong that they can return to their nests from as far as 1,000 kilometers away.

However, in the last few decades, the rate of pigeons returning to the nest has been declining. An increasing number of pigeons in the race have been unable to return to their nests. And, troublingly, the cause of this is not known. There are theories about the proliferation of raptors, the effects of reduced earth's rotation speed and geomagnetic attenuation, and the effects of electromagnetic waves from cell phones, but it is not known what is driving the pigeon's nesting instinct, so it is not known why the rate of return is down.

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