A Dance with Dragons. (And, well, Romping with Ravens. And Performing with Pigeons.)

Among the only thing nerdier than contributing to a science blog is making a post celebrating the release of the next in a series of fantasy novels, and some of its biology.

So. Hey ladies, get out your halberds, it's about to get weird:

*Not actually an account of my senior prom (shudder)

Nearly 6 years in the making, George R.R. Martin's latest novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series A Dance with Dragons hits the shelves of something called a "bookstore" today. This is the latest 1040 pages, the 5th volume in Martin's epic series that most famously began with Game of Thrones, now an HBO series everyone on your Twitter keeps talking about.

Come for the genre-bending fantasy, stay for the violence and sexual depravity, and return for the awesome raven-based mail system. 

Yeah, that's right, amidst all the prostitution, incest and beheadings (not a euphemism), this fella gets hyped to see ravens deliver mail.
 

Deliverth the Raven

Really hyped, apparently. I have a lot to say on this subject:

The Game of Thrones is played between the Seven Kingdoms of the large continent of Westeros, where treachery leads to upheaval and the lands become ridden with war. And George R.R. Martin ridden with profits, he's sold 6 million books in the US.

In a series with such high political drama and vast geography, rapid means of communication are needed by the characters to prevent monstrous passages of Tolkien-esque exposition: In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.

Any respectable castle in Westeros keeps a maester, a monk-like man of science who is responsible for education as well as maintaining a flock of ravens for communication with other castles.

Messages tied to birds' legs and flown about a land is not that far-fetched of a concept. Pigeons' innate ability to return to their home nest and spouse has been utilized since 5th century BC in Persia and present-day Syria. They were important in the World Wars as means of communication from areas where telegraph lines were not set-up and to communicate across enemy lines.

21 pigeons even received an English Service medal, which is, I'm sure you'll agree, precious.

The basic way the system works is the carrier bird can typically only travel one way: to its home. In some cases, two way travel has been achieved with food offered at both locations. Barring some supernatural component of the world, I assume this two way travel is how this communication is achieved. The bigger castles have ravens that call that place home, and distribute them throughout the realms.

In some cases, like when Stannis is intending to spread a nasty rumor about the Lannister family (hopefully that's not a spoiler), a castle will release a lot of ravens and sort of raven-spam the kingdoms. I can't fathom how that would work, maybe they confused the ravens with magnets or something.

But this isn't Evolving.Dude.Who.Rips.Stuff.Off.Wikipedia.net (that domain name, by the way, shockingly, isn't taken).

HOW do Westeros-ian Ravens and non-nerd-world Pigeons navigate so well (the latter have been recorded in competition upwards of 1,000 miles)?


There's some debate over the mechanism, but the soundest synthesis I can gather is the following:

The most intriguing, at least as a physiology, is magnetoreception. Little is definitively understood regarding this sense, but evidence of its existence is very convincing. Some scientists propose that iron atoms in birds' beaks send signals of their interactions with surrounding magnetic fields to the brain. Others propose a compass mechanism that is light-dependent. A family of molecules known as cryptochromes may cause the release of free-radicals, or molecules with unpaired electrons . These free electrons can be influenced by the magnetic fields, and could even cause a distortion in the perceived image by the birds eye. Robins that have been blinded in one eye are unable to navigate as previous. These cryptochrome molecules, which at least serve as photoreceptors in fruit-flies, have also been implicated in butterfly migration. (Most of this is learned from birds that are known to migrate seasonally, whether it applies to pigeons specifically is unknown. Also, any references I would cite here are behind a pay-wall, but you can read this)

The longer distance navigations likely begin with this strategy, of just traveling in the general direction until you get to a location you recognize, where a bird can switch to:

Travelling via landmarks. There is less hand-waving in this component of homing pigeons' navigation capabilities. Dr. Tom Guilford attached GPS tracking devices to pigeons and noticed that their routes to their homes often fell within 4 feet of common roadways or other likely, physical landmark (free article).

So there you go! Martin's ravens might use ferrous beak deposits and/or cryptochromes in the eye, the ability to luse landmarks to denote paths, and perhaps some help from the Old Gods to deliver the urgent message that one has been attacked by the Others. Feel free to ponder this as you skip over these sections on your way to the next fight and/or sex scene.

Or at least imagine how a mail raven would hold up against one of Mike Tyson's 350 pigeons.


Join me in six years for the release of the next book, as I discuss the science behind why Tyrion is so effing awesome.