There is a small corner of Stephen Fry's reverent retelling of Greek myths where he admits the less-well-known Hestia, keeper of the hearth, is perhaps his favorite goddess. Creating and keeping a home, in both the psychological and literal sense, has an exquisite meaning and relevance to humanity. It is from home which things emanate and to home that things return.

In Homing, Jon Day's warm yet ofttimes hesitant devotion to raising and racing pigeons, he considerately ponders this odd couple: liberation and homing. We leave and return. Why?

 Pigeon nest and eggs (abandoned) outside our apartment.

Pigeons are "synanthropes": creatures that live alongside humans, thriving in environments that we create. Not tame but no longer wild, pigeons move between the familiar, the banal, and the annoying ('pests' is the animal equivalent of 'weed').  Unlike - and Day points this out, too - my beloved corvids who are the stuff of inspiration for the likes of poets Ted Hughes or Max Porter.

And yet, pigeons are extraordinary creatures, parallel to humans in many ways. "Despite the fact that they were non-migratory," Day writes, "the pull of home is for pigeons more powerful than that felt by any animal."

Once their home loft has been imprinted on them - something that happens when they are around six weeks old - homing pigeons will return to it for the rest of their lives. Even if kept away for many years they will, once freed, often try to make their way back. Pigeons can fly thousands of miles and will cross oceans to get home. The love - if that is the right word - that pigeons feel for their homes is so acute that they will sometimes die for it. In his diary, Samuel Pepys recorded that during the Great Fire of London, while people scrambled to save their lives and goods, 'the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses.'

Day traces his pigeon fascination to boyhood play, like many of our adult habits.

There was a period in my childhood when my friend Nick and I used to rescue feral pigeons from the streets of London. Most seemed to die fairly quickly, succumbing to one of the many medieval-sounding diseases - 'canker' or 'one-eye cold' or 'pox' - which we read about in the pigeon-keeping books we discovered on an overlooked shelf in the local library. But one, a bird that for some reason we christened 'Psycho,' thrived under our ham-fisted care.

Like novelist Haruki Murakami, who meditates on his running habit in the shadow of an upcoming marathon, Day's backdrop is a 500-mile pigeon race, the 2018 Thurso Classic, "one of the longest and most prestigious races in the club calendar."   While I read Homing, I imagined birds in the air the whole time, thundering south in a speckled formation; dropping, falling, and casually - yet earnestly - making their way back to the nest. I even skipped ahead for updates, as if it were happening in real time and I could fast-forward through the recorded match.

Juvenile wood pigeon. Illustration from The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), an organization that educates, advocates, and conserves birds throughout the UK. Learn more.

The liberation point - the point of opening the cages and setting the birds to flight - is more than 500 miles from their home nest.

I love that word. Liberation. It has such ample meaning. To us, it represents positive emotions associated with freedom.   "Americans liberated the camps," Elie Wiesel writes in this memoir of the Holocaust. Liberation implies tyranny, a victim or perhaps a prisoner of sorts, and then a hero and freedom. At least it does to me, an American. What does it mean to you? For a kept pigeon, the liberation point is the furthest point from home they will go (in that race) and thus the point at which they begin to return home.

Day memorably describes how a pigeon must be released and freed to come home.

In 1956, the German zoologist Gustav Kramer decided to test whether pigeons that were never allowed to fly free would be able to home successfully from distant release points. He conducted a series of experiments in which pigeons were kept from their fledging onwards in an aviary that allowed them to exercise but never to fly outside the loft. Kramer discovered that his aviary-bred pigeons were no worse at navigating over long distances than were their free-flying companions. But they were much worse at getting back inside their lofts once they'd returned to their familiar territory, as they had no idea what they looked like from above. To know home, he concluded, a pigeon had to have been allowed to see it from the air at a young age. Birds that were not allowed to range would never be good at homing, therefore.

Day develops the intricacies of 'homing' alongside his experience as a new and expectant parent and finds the themes dovetail nicely. When I was an expectant and new parent, I understood the homing instinct (bizarrely, humans have begun to call it 'nesting' in English; generations ago we called it 'brooding.') and the alienation of self that comes with having a child. It is our liberation point.

"Melbourne, Australia" by Andrew Wurster. Wurster's work features unpeopled landscapes of his hometown. Motifs include walls, closed doors, shut windows, barred gates, and striking capture of suggested – but not seen – lives. His images question home, community, childhood, and the psychic nature of place.

As a new parent, I felt agitated and paralyzed simultaneously, and rather wonderfully, something in this book shifted the stuck-ness. As Day mentions, we are children; we adventure out in the world and build understanding. Adulthood brings settlement, hastened by parenting, house buying, etc. At some point, we become the home, the thing something else returns to.

Day captures this feeling.

I felt the same each time I liberated them: a sense of soaring excitement quickly followed by an intense gnawing fear, a fear I found impossible to ignore and which persisted until I knew they had made it back home safely. There was little I could do to influence their flight or make them more likely to return: I had to wait, trust, and hope. I had to learn to let go, to give the birds enough freedom to learn to home without giving them so much they would be lost.

But it is more than 'Will they return or won't they?'. When we become someone else's home, we must constantly tend to that home fire, like good old Hestia. It's natural to feel stasis coupled with agitation.

Adult wood pigeon. Illustration from The RSPB. Learn more.

I had to wait three days before I saw the first of them. I would like to say that I saw him fly in high from the north, dropping out of the clear blue sky and onto the roof of the loft, but it didn't happen like that. I was upstairs in my study when Nataly called. There was a pigeon walking around the kitchen, she said. It looked familiar and was wearing a blue rubber race ring on its leg. I ran downstairs as quickly as I could. There, strutting around as if he owned the place, was Orange.

Finally, the return. A prodigal bird indeed.

The compulsion to go home is something pigeons and humans develop instinctively. Pigeons home through intense olfactory mapmaking, humans mainly use sight and navigational tools. For many of us, learning how to be a home is a lot less natural and a lot more uncomfortable. It is a signal of adulthood in many ways, a right of passage we associate with home-buying or having children - what we are doing is becoming a home.

Collage artist Mark Hearld's flight of pigeons and stairs at Pica Studios in York. Learn more. Photograph by Hermione McCosh.

Accompany Day's enriching tale of home, family, pets, and deep, abiding agitation of life with Robert Macfarlane's search for that which is wild in life and self; Helen Macdonald's love for a goshawk as a salve for grief; and John Bradshaw's bright study of animals that make us irrevocably human.

And finally, perhaps a bit macabre to end on this note, but it's worth consideration in the art of animal husbandry, Ted Hughes' "The Dove Breeder" published in his first collection of poems.

The Dove Breeder

Love struck into his life
Like a hawk into a dovecote.
What a cry went up!
Every gentle pedigree dove
Blindly clattered and beat,
And the mild-mannered dove-breeder
Shrieked at that raider.

He might well wring his hands.
And let his tears drop:
He will win no more prizes
With fantails or pouters,
(After all these years
Through third, up through second places
Till they were all world beaters ...)

Yet he soon dried his tears

Now he rides the morning mist
With a big-eyed hawk on his fist.