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Photo: Frank Cornelissen / iStockphoto / Getty Images
It was supposed to be a race to northern England - and became an odyssey to the other side of the Atlantic.
A carrier pigeon named Bob took off from the Channel Island of Guernsey and was supposed to fly 617 kilometers away to Gateshead, just before the Scottish border.
The flight was supposed to last ten hours.
But the four-year-old pigeon never arrived.
Then came a sign of life from Monroe County in Alabama, almost 7000 kilometers away from Gateshead: A pigeon had flown into an elderly man's house and could not be expelled.
Noticing that she was wearing a ring, he asked the local animal shelter for help.
An employee of the Monroe County Alabama Animal Shelters caught the pigeon, deciphered the numbers on the ring - and was amazed: she was able to identify a carrier pigeon association in northern England, the North of England Homing Union, as the owner.
'4000 miles away in North East England!!!!!
Far FAR AWAY!” she wrote in a Facebook post from the shelter.
There she also reports that the pigeon is doing well.
The bird is a bit malnourished, but not injured.
Photos on Facebook show the animal shelter employee with Bob shopping for bird seed.
A little later contact was made with the owner of the pigeon, Alan Todd.
He checked via webcam that Bob was fine.
But how did the bird get from the English Channel to the southern states?
"He can't have flown that far," the BBC quoted the pigeon's owner as saying.
He probably landed on a ship and sailed across the Atlantic.
"It was covered in oil - it may well have been on board an oil tanker."
Alan Todd is now planning a trip to Alabama to take the stray pigeon home.
After all, Bob is worth more than a thousand pounds.
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