April 30, 2004
The Doves
When I was little, (don’t ask how little because I am not sure, let’s just say somewhere around ten years old or so,) I found a dove that had an encounter with the business end of a peashooter. He didn’t look that bad off, but he was definitely not feeling well, so I picked him up and took him home.
When I got home I showed the dove to the one person I knew who could fix anything, my father. He checked the dove over, and told me that the he had indeed taken a hit to the head and was a little disoriented but that he should be fine. He said it was probably because of the head injury that the dove couldn’t fly, and that it may or may not fly again soon, and that either way it was up to us to keep him safe and comfortable.
My dad is an engineer, and can design and build ANYTHING at the drop of a hat. He took off his sports coat, lead me and my new friend out to the garage, and in the time it took most fathers to crack a beer and scratch their ass he had built a makeshift birdcage out of an old orange crate he had been using to hold some even older electrical parts. He did a good job too. He covered the front with chicken wire, and cut a large hole in the back of the crate, which he covered with a door that slid up and down. He cut smaller holes in each side, and pushed a piece of dowel through it so the bird had a place to perch. He then affixed an eyebolt to the top of the new cage, and we hung it off of an eve of his greenhouse. It was amazing.
That weekend my father built the most awesome birdcage for my dove. It measured probably two and a half to three feet deep by maybe four feet long and three feet high. It had a pitched roof with chicken wire around three sides and the back covered by wood. The floor was ¼ inch mesh wire, and it had three dowels for perches. It was a dove mansion. I thought my dove might be lonely, so I bought two more to keep him company from a local feed and seed store. They all got along swimmingly. They got along so well they even had eggs!
When the first clutch was laid, my dad modified the cage by adding a nesting box to the back. It was of the same design as the door on the first cage; the nesting box slid on the back of the cage over a large hole big enough for the doves to enter. We provided nesting material, and moved the clutch of eggs into the box.
Unfortunately, the first bunch of eggs died, but there were others and the survival rate must have been about 90%. Soon I was in the dove business. When the baby’s grew into young birds old enough to leave the nest, I took them to the feed-and-seed and sold them for a buck. I can’t remember how long we had the birds, but it was at least a few years. I remember the cooing noise they would make in the morning, and the weird weeds that would grow under their cage from the birdseed. (I later discovered that there was a low-grade variety of hemp that grew out of that birdfeed mix. My first marijuana crop!)
The old greenhouse is long gone, as are the cage and the doves, but fond memories remain with me of the compassion my father showed for those birds, and the love he demonstrated for his son by being late for his job because he had to build a bird cage for a injured dove his kid found.