RFC1149 entitled IP over avian carriers is one of those RFCs that were published on April 1st. It describes a method to carry IP packets by using pigeons. RFC1149 was designed during the dialup era and packets were printed on sheets of papers before being attached to pigeons and a scanner was used by the recipient to recover the packet. Among all the April fools RFCs that have been written, RFC1149 is one of the few that has actually been implemented. A Linux user group in Norway actually implemented this RFC and they even received an award during an IETF meeting for their implementation. Since then, other groups have developed various techniques to transport IP packets, such as using snails.

Recently, a South African pigeon showed that he could transport data (actually a 4 GBytes memory stick) much faster than ADSL. This should not be surprising to students who have used Andrew Tanenbaum's Computer Networks book to learn networking as one of his proposed exercise is to compare the bandwidth of a motorcycle carrying backups tapes (or a plane carrying DVDs) to a high-speed link... In fact, some banks in Brussels have actually used motorcycles to move backups from one data center to another...