required reading

How does Susan Orlean do it? "Little Wing," her piece in the Feb. 13 and 20 anniversary issue of The New Yorker has been bought for $250,000 by Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies. Little wonder. From the first paragraph, I was hooked.

"On a bright, breezy Saturday not long ago, Sedona Murphy gave her homing pigeons away. Earlier that morning, the birds had flown around the neighborhood, looping over the shaggy old trees and the peaked rooftops of South Boston before returning to their gray shed in the Murphy's back yard. They then toddled obligingly into their wooden case. These were racing birds, accustomed to being crated and carried, so the close quarters were nothing new, and they had no way of knowing that this was the last time they would ever fly free."

Homing pigeons, you're thinking. How interesting can they be. Hello, did you see what she did with orchids?

In a tradition that predates the Roman Empire, she explains, pigeons have been finding their way home over hundreds of miles and entirely without the assistance of Google Maps. The birds "have a fixed, profound, and nearly incontrovertible sense of home. Americans move, on average, every five years; pigeons almost never move," she writes. So when 13-year-old Sedona's family leaves South Boston for a new home, 30 miles west, in Southborough, Mass., her collection of racing pigeons kiss the open skies goodbye. Pigeons are like a one-trick pony; they can't be retrained to a new home, and they aren't equipped to live in the wild. So unless the home buyer digs your pigeons as much as you do (because they will never leave), homing pigeons that are moved have to be caged for the rest of their lives. "They become what are called 'prisoners,'" she writes. "It's as if you had pasted your stamp collection on your bedroom walls and then, when it came time to move, you couldn't get it unglued," Orlean says.

I'd link to it, but The New Yorker is so impossibly offline.