Novice Corner - Can They Find Home?

One of the more common questions posed to me by novice fanciers (or people considering getting pigeons) is usually some variation of "Can these birds find their way home?" This is the pigeon's great claim to fame; the ability to return home from some place they've never seen before even if that place is hundreds of miles away.

1. Racing homers are bred to come home from a long ways away (sometimes as much as 500 miles). However, even given that, the birds need to practice finding their way home from shorter distances. Part of this magical ability to find their way home is learning where home is. The pigeons have be able to get out of the loft to see landmarks, smell the landscape and generally learn how to recognize home from the air.
2. Fancy pigeons, that is, jacobins, fantails, trumpeters etc., were selected for their appearance and not their ability to return home from long distances. They might be able to return home but I wouldn't bank on it. Having said that though, a fancier should be able to let fancy pigeons out of the loft (provided they've been trained in how to trap back into the loft) with no worry of the bird getting lost. That's not to say that letting your pigeons out won't offend your neighbors or possibly expose them to becoming a raptor's dinner. That's just to say that you should be able to let even fancy pigeons out and they should be relatively ok, all other things being equal.
3. It's not uncommon for animals to have behaviors that are partially driven by instinct and partially learned. I recall reading an article from Scientific American regarding how baby gulls were born with an instinct for getting food from their parents but that they also improved upon that basic instinct by learning how to better get the food from their parents over time. I don't believe it would be a dangerously large leap of logic to infer that the behavior of being able to return home from long distances in pigeons is at least partially learned.

So, bottom line, yes, you can fly pretty much any pigeon but I wouldn't take anything other than a racing homer any appreciable distance from a loft and even then I'd make sure that the racing homer had a good chance to learn the lay of the land.