Pam and I were listening to a story recently about the police in India “arresting” a pigeon for spying. Attached to the bird was a message written in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. Since the folks who found the bird and its message didn’t know Urdu, the bird and the message were taken to the local police. 

There had been incidents of spying in the area before so the bird and the message were treated as “suspicious”. Eventually, they found that the message was the pigeon’s owner’s name and phone number. Apparently, this is something that pigeons-fanciers put on their birds. 

The reporter sprinkled article with jokes about bird spies (“The name is Bird, James Bird”) and a number of bird-related puns , ending with “Pigeons never confess.”

I added to Pam, “But pigeons do rat out their colleagues.”

“Stool pigeons that is.”