Homing by Jon Day
Jon Day was attracted to pigeons as a child and used to save them from London’s streets. Twenty years later, he relocated to the suburbs to start a family, leaving the city centre behind. But as he moved houses, he started to forget what it meant to feel at home. He rekindled his love of pigeons from his early years by constructing a coop in his garden and joining a pigeon racing club. He spent the following several years raising his young family in Leyton and learning how to train and race pigeons in the hopes that they would teach him how to feel at home.
Homing by Jon Day
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Pigeons are potent emblems of domesticity and peace since they have coexisted intimately with humans for thousands of years. However, they are also frequently disparaged, and currently, the majority of people consider these birds to be vermin if they still do.
A book exploring the underappreciated beauty of this species and what it means to live, The intriguing world of pigeon fancying is explored in Homing, along with the scientific puzzles of animal homing and the philosophical, political, and cultural significance of home. It is a book about creating a home and creating for a home; it is a book about the reasons we go home.
In order to explore the meaning of home and how we define, miss, leave, and return to it, Jon Day turns to the simple racing pigeon. He gives this brave bird the respect it deserves in both natural history and human history, and he celebrates our mutual urge for home through the art of his own family and academic career. He shares a lot of great stories about how we’ve used these amazing birds’ homing instincts in both war and peace. Day swoops and soars over numerous artistic and scientific disciplines to reveal our innate desire for home.
It provides a fascinating look into the enigmatic world of pigeon racing. This book is more than just a pigeon-related tale. Additionally, it discusses what “home” is, how we establish ourselves, nostalgia, and homesickness. But the story of one 700-kilometre racing pigeon journey from Thurso to London serves as the book’s unifying theme, and it is an incredibly compelling one.
