The book reads easily and I did enjoy it, but it was also a little disappointing, with all the dated science.

Large parts of this book were enjoyable and interesting. It is filled with all sorts of interesting stories and factoids about pigeons. For instance, that they use smell as well as the earth's magnetic field and the sun for navigation and that whilst flying they only use 5 calories an hour (though can that really be true? I use that to take two steps).

The author mixes his own personal life (to be honest, not that interesting) with what was going on with his pigeons. Some natural history writers do that very successfully (Rob Cowen, for example in Common Ground), but in that case they do that because of parallels that they draw between their own lives and their observations. Jon Day tries to do that with the notion of home, but it doesn't really work. I think that is because he doesn't really go into details about how territories work with birds.

He does cite quite a bit of science, but surprisingly it is nearly all really old. Darwin and Freud are cited at length, but then he doesn't say anything about modern evolutionary science or psychology. Likewise, he mentions 19th century work on how birds use magnetism for navigation, but nothing on modern work. One thing that I found a bit irritating is that he gives that nutter Rupert Sheldrake credibility.

I read this book in the Dutch translation by Hanneke Bos. It was mostly excellent, with only the odd phrase reading like a literal translation of the English. There were one or two amusing mistakes. For instance, 'oranje kratten' were almost certainly 'sinusappelkratten' (that is the fruit, not the colour) in the original. Probably the average Dutch reader would appreciate some more help with all the pace names.

The book reads easily and I did enjoy it, but it was also a little disappointing, with all the dated science.