Bob the Geordie homing pigeon hitches a lift to US

Racing bird veered off course during race and was found thousands of miles away in Alabama

IT IS 380 miles as the crow flies from Guernsey to Gateshead, but in the case of Bob the racing pigeon, it has ended up being quite a bit longer.

The Geordie flyer, pictured right, turned up 4,300 miles away in Alabama, having apparently hitched a transatlantic ride aboard a ship.

Bob was released on the Channel Island of Guernsey three weeks ago as part of a race home to Tyneside, but Bob did not return home with the flock.

Somewhere over the Channel, it appeared to have ended up on a ship. Bob’s owner, Alan Todd, told the BBC: “He wouldn’t have flown all that way. I think he has probably jumped on to a ship. He was covered in oil – it could have been an oil tanker.”

The Channel is the world’s busiest shipping lane, with more than 600 large vessels passing through each day.

Alabama is one of the US’S oil-producing and refining states on the Gulf of Mexico. After Bob landed in the garden of a man in Mexia, Monroe County, the man phoned the Monroe County Alabama Animal Shelter where Megan Bryan and Monica Hardy took Bob in.

As a homing pigeon, Bob is thought to be worth about £1,000 and is microchipped. Ms Bryan and Ms Hardy tracked Bob’s chip, via the North of England Homing Union, to Mr Todd, reuniting them over video call.

“They are obviously looking after him very well – when I saw him yesterday he didn’t look in a good state, but looking at him today he looks a lot better just in one day,” Mr Todd said. He plans to fly to Alabama to bring Bob home to Winlaton.

Wild pigeons are at risk of extinction after interbreeding with city-dwelling pigeons, an Oxford scientist has found. The rock dove is already extinct in England and Wales, with Scotland and Ireland its last hope, and data show it is on the brink of disappearing.

Study author Will Smith, a University of Oxford postgraduate student, welcomed the fact that feral pigeon DNA was “barely detectable” on Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, but said the overall status of the rock dove was “compromised”. Writing in iscience, he said that “it might be that, within a couple of decades, the wild rock dove is extinct all over the continent”.