A racing pigeon sits on a rooftop Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2021, in Melbourne, Australia, The racing pigeon, first spotted in late December, was believed to have made an extraordinary 8,000-mile Pacific Ocean crossing from the United States to Australia.

(Channel 9 via AP)

At a Glance

The pigeon from Montgomery, Alabama, disappeared during a race in Oregon in October.It turned up in December near Melbourne, Australia. Australian agriculture officials had said it could be carrying diseases.

Joe the pigeon has been granted a reprieve and won't be euthanized.

Turns out, he's a fraud.

The pigeon was believed to have been lost during a race in October in Oregon, and then thought to have made his way 8,000 miles away to Australia, where a man said he found it in his backyard.

Officials there said the bird, which the man named in honor of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, was a quarantine risk and they would try to catch it and kill it.

But then, on Friday, the Australia Department of Agriculture announced that Joe's blue leg band, which has a registration number on it that led them to believe it was the bird that disappeared from Oregon, was fake.

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"Multiple sources the leg band on Joe the Pigeon to be a fraudulent copy," the agency announced. "The bird is highly likely to be a local and no risk to other Australian birds — no further action will be taken.

Kevin Celli-Bird, who lives in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, told 9 News in his backyard on Dec. 26.

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Experts told 9 News the bird may have hitched a ride across the Pacific Ocean aboard a cargo ship.

Celli-Bird said Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service authorities contacted him Thursday to ask him to catch the pigeon so they could euthanize it.

The Agriculture Department said the pigeon was "not permitted to remain in Australia" because it "could compromise Australia's food security and our wild bird populations," according to 9 News.

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"It poses a direct biosecurity risk to Australian bird life and our poultry industry," the department said.

"They say if it is from America, then they’re concerned about bird diseases," Celli-Bird said. "They wanted to know if I could help them out. I said, 'To be honest, I can’t catch it. I can get within 500 mil (millimeters or 20 inches) of it and then it moves.'"

At the time, he said officials were considering hiring a professional bird catcher.

The racing pigeon named Joe, after the U.S. president-elect, sits on a rooftop Tuesday, January 12, 2021, in Melbourne, Australia.

(Kevin Celli-Bird via AP)

“It rocked up at our place on Boxing Day. I’ve got a fountain in the backyard and it was having a drink and a wash. He was pretty emaciated so I crushed up a dry biscuit and left it out there for him,” Celli-Bird said, according to the Associated Press.

“Next day, he rocked back up at our water feature, so I wandered out to have a look at him because he was fairly weak and he didn’t seem that afraid of me and I saw he had a blue band on his leg. Obviously, he belongs to someone, so I managed to catch him,” he added.

Celli-Bird said he had been unable to contact the person who was believed to be the pigeon's owner, who lives in Alabama.

Australian National Pigeon Association secretary Brad Turner told AP there were genuine fears pigeons from the United States could carry exotic diseases and he agreed the bird should be euthanized.

"While it sounds harsh to the normal person — they’d hear that and go: ‘this is cruel,’ and everything else — I’d think you’d find that A.Q.I.S. (the quarantine service) and those sort of people would give their wholehearted support for the idea,” he said.

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