A racing pigeon that appeared to have traveled from Oregon to a backyard in Melbourne faces death. But there’s a twist.
MELBOURNE, Australia — The racing pigeon appeared to have traveled far, from Oregon, when it showed up weak and hungry in a backyard in a Melbourne suburb.
Someone decided to name it Joe, after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But Australian officials, fearing the spread of germs from a foreign bird, would not bend the rules: The bird must die.
The tale of the bird that traveled more than eight thousand miles only to end up on Australia’s death row caused a stir on the internet.
It began when a man named David Celli-Bird (no relation), a building inspector, found Joe on Dec. 26 after it flew into his backyard in Officer, a quiet suburb in Melbourne’s southeast, with a band dangling around one leg.
“When it landed, it was very weak and in an emaciated state,” Mr. Celli-Bird said in an interview on Friday. He fed the pigeon to bring it back to health.
Driven by curiosity about its origins, he searched online for the numbers on the bird’s leg band. They matched those of a bird from an Oregon pigeon race that began on Oct. 29. He discovered that a male bird had gone missing.
Mr. Celli-Bird said he inquired with the American Pigeon Racing Union, which said the bird he had found was registered to someone in Alabama. With this information in hand, he and some friends thought it made sense to name the pigeon after a notable American figure.
“We were sitting around, having a laugh, throwing around names,” he said. “We thought, ‘Well, Joe’s the incoming president; we’ll give him that name.’”
They did consider “Donald,” Mr. Celli-Bird said, but “we thought it might not be politically correct with what’s going on.”
International news outlets picked up the strange tale of a bird named Joe, and the internet marveled at its journey. The authorities said they believed it had most likely hitched a ride on a cargo ship.
Brad Turner, secretary of the Australian National Pigeon Association, told The Associated Press that he had heard of cases of Chinese racing pigeons reaching the Australian west coast aboard cargo ships.
The greatest long-distance flight recorded by a pigeon is claimed to have started in Arras, France, and ended in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1931, according to the website Pigeonpedia. “The distance was 7,200 miles, and it took 24 days,” the website says.
Mr. Celli-Bird thought it was all a bit of good fun, but the Australian authorities had a different take on the situation. The Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment said Joe “posed a direct biosecurity risk to Australian bird life and our poultry industry.” It intended to euthanize him, local media reported.
Australia has notoriously strict biosecurity laws. In 2015, Barnaby Joyce, then agricultural minister, threatened to euthanize the actor Johnny Depp’s two Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, because they had not been declared to customs when they arrived in Queensland aboard a private jet. Luckily, arrangements were made for the two dogs to be flown back to the United States. Amber Heard, then Mr. Depp’s wife, later pleaded guilty in a Queensland court to providing false information on her passenger card after she and the dogs landed on the Gold Coast to visit the actor, and the couple offered an apology.
Acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack showed no mercy about the pigeon matter at a news conference, saying: “If Joe has come in a way that has not met out strict biosecurity measures, then bad luck, Joe. Either fly home or face the consequences.”
Faced with the prospect of Joe’s demise, Mr. Celli-Bird had second thoughts about the name he had given the bird. “Last night I thought maybe we should have called him Donald,” he said. “Maybe we could have gotten a presidential pardon or diplomatic immunity.”
But on Friday, information suddenly emerged that may give the bird a reprieve: Joe may not be an American pigeon after all.
A local pigeon rescue group said on Facebook that it had seen plenty of local birds wearing the same type of band found on Joe’s leg. “We believe he is not an American pigeon at all — rather an Australian pigeon wearing a knockoff American ring that anyone could buy off eBay,” the organization said.
A spokeswoman for the American Racing Pigeon Union also said that Joe’s band was probably a counterfeit and that he was in all likelihood an Australian pigeon, according to The Associated Press.
The Department of Agriculture said it was “investigating the authenticity of the U.S. identification tag.”
Mr. Celli-Bird said he had been in contact with the Melbourne Pigeon Rescue and the Department of Agriculture, and officials were planning to try to capture Joe on Friday to determine the bird’s origins.
“I’m happy for them to come out and clarify for everyone’s peace of mind who or where the bird came from,” he said. He stressed that he had no intention of misleading anyone.
Another matter was weighing on Mr. Celli-Bird’s mind: whether the bird will get to keep its new name. If it turns out that the pigeon is, in fact, female, he said, “we might have to change it to Joanna or something.”
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