Joe the pigeon made it across the Pacific to Australia. Now he’s on death row.
By Erin Cunningham,
AP
An Alabama racing pigeon that survived a lengthy and mysterious trip across the Pacific Ocean — landing last month in an Australian backyard — is now facing the death penalty.
Local authorities, worried about disease, say they plan to kill the bird as soon as they can catch it.
The exhausted pigeon, sporting a blue band on its ankle, “rocked up” to the home of aptly named Melbourne resident Kevin Celli-Bird last month, the man said.
“It was pretty emaciated so I crushed up some biscuits,” he told Australia’s 9News.
The bird, a racing pigeon registered to an owner in Montgomery, Ala., is believed to have escaped a competition in Oregon in October, possibly hitching a ride aboard a cargo ship before reaching Australia.
[Pigeon racing in Iraq: Pricey birds, obsessive owners and, alas, stone-throwing bandits]
But now the pigeon, which Celli-Bird has named Joe (after President-elect Joe Biden) hangs out in his backyard, bathing in the fountain and has even befriended a local dove.
“I think that he just decided that since I’ve given him some food and he’s got a spot to drink, that’s home,” Celli-Bird said, the Associated Press reported.
But while Joe may have survived the 8,000-mile journey, Australia has some of the world’s strictest quarantine laws, and a pigeon from the United States could be carrying exotic diseases that threaten Australia’s biosecurity, authorities said.
Under normal circumstances, importing a pigeon would require permits, health certificates and a reservation at a quarantine facility.
In 2015, Australian authorities threatened to euthanize two dogs belonging to Johnny Depp and his then-wife Amber Heard, after they sneaked the Yorkshire terriers into the country without the proper permits.
“We found out he snuck them in because we saw them taking them to a poodle groomer,” former agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce said in an interview at the time.
“If we start letting movie stars — even though they’ve been the sexiest man alive twice — to come into our nation, why we don’t just break the laws for everybody?” he said. “It’s time that Pistol and Boo [the two dogs] buggered off back to the United States.”
An Agriculture Department statement said of Joe the pigeon that the bird was “not permitted to remain in Australia” because “it could compromise Australia’s food security and our wild bird populations,” according to the AP.
“It poses a direct biosecurity risk to Australian bird life and our poultry industry,” the statement said.
Someone glued tiny MAGA hats and a Trump wig onto pigeons in Las Vegas
Believe it or not, pigeons aren’t half-bad as pets
‘The pigeons make me feel free’: An old pastime thrives in a Palestinian refugee camp
