‘Mr. Dovely’ and his fabulous flying flock
Local area pigeon flyer Clint Fitzhugh has made a career out of his all-white doves
Jaime Valdez / Times Newspapers
Clinton Fitzhugh, aka ‘Mr. Dovely,’ stands in his pigeon loft. For nearly 30 years, Fitzhugh has provided his pigeons for events throughout the state, including weddings and funerals.
For ‘Mr. Dovely,’ playing with pigeons is serious business.
The 65-year-old Beaverton resident – whose real name is Clinton Fitzhugh – has been working in the pigeon-event business for almost 30 years. Arriving at weddings, funerals, baptisms, and other services throughout Oregon with a small crate of all-white pigeons waiting for their ceremonial release into the sky.
Once released, the birds circle a few times and then fly back to their home, a small pigeon loft in the backyard of Fitzhugh’s unassuming brick house near 185th Street and Walker Road.
“I’ve been doing it for years,” Fitzhugh said. “When I hit my stride, I was making $1,000 a day, doing four events a day on weekends ... I was averaging $16,000 a year by just doing it as a hobby, part time.”
Fitzhugh, who is celebrating his 27th year in the business, first got interested in pigeons at the age of 17.
“I got pigeons by sheer accident,” he said. “My neighbor had pigeons and was letting them go about two blocks from his house. He let me handle one, and I said, ‘Oh, I want these.’ So I went down the river to those old railroad piers from World War II, and if you climbed up there at night and you could take the babies off the nest, put them in a big gunny sack and take them home.”
Fitzhugh had the pigeons until he graduated from high school, eventually giving up the hobby when he joined the Navy.
Fitzhugh never got over his experiences with pigeons. “I never got out of it completely,” he said. “You have that yearning, you don’t lose that.”
Fitzhugh got back into the hobby in the early 1980s, and then stumbled into the pigeon-event business.
“I got into that by accident, too,” he said. “When I was getting back into pigeons, people just gave me birds, and I got a few white ones, and my daughter took one to a wedding and let it go and she came back and said, ‘You know, Dad, I think you should get into this.’”
A Beaverton ordinance allows residents with a permit to keep pigeons.
‘Be good or be gone’
Fitzhugh’s pigeons are extensively trained, over several years before they make it to the team.
“Every bird has to perform. They are all performance tested,” he said. “Everything here is be good or be gone. We move quick in this loft.”
Fitzhugh trains his birds by competing in the local pigeon-racing club.
Meeting once a week, Fitzhugh’s birds are shipped across the state with hundreds of other Portland-area pigeons, and released all at once.
The birds use their homing instinct to find their way home, flying from distances of 100 to 500 miles. Pigeon racers compete amongst themselves to see whose birds can come home first.
“My birds get sent out every week,” he said. After the race season, the racing birds are promoted, and become his breeding stock for the following year. The breeders, in turn, move up to become “Dovelys” where they will – in Fitzhugh’s words – “have to work for a living.”
“I have to train them, they have to be able to find their way home,” he said. “Because I never know where I am going to be for an event, I could be in Milwaukie or Gresham, or Newberg or Salem. I’ve done events in Eugene and Ecola State Park.”
That is why Fitzhugh trains his pigeons so thoroughly before they start working at events.
“When you’ve got a bird that’s 3 or 4 years old, you won’t lose as many,” he said.
That doesn’t mean, however, that losses don’t happen.
Power lines are a big problem for area pigeon flyers, because the birds may not be able to see the thin wires as they fly, striking them at speeds approaching 40 miles per hour.
But, Fitzhugh said, the main problem is hawks.
“Oh man, do we have hawk problems,” he said. “If the birds are on the ground Cooper’s hawks will catch them, if a bird lands in a tree, the red-tailed hawks will dive right into the trees after them, Peregrine falcons will take them right out of the sky.”
But Fitzhugh said that while hawks are a definite problem for him – he lost 20 pigeons to hawks before this year’s racing season began – he wouldn’t dare kill one.
In 2007, three Portland-area pigeon breeders plead guilty to killing hawks that tried to eat their pigeons. Hawks are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Protection Act.
‘Give up weekends’
Now semi-retired, Fitzhugh mostly relies on “do-it-yourself kits” for funerals and other events. The pigeons are placed in large gift-bags, tied with bows and taken to the event, where they can be released at the party’s convenience.
“People don’t always want a stranger at their event, especially if it’s a funeral with just family,” he said. “And they see me as a stranger, so the kits really help with that.”
Not every event goes smoothly, however, like the time that Ftizhugh was releasing pigeons at a wedding that featured a horse-drawn carriage.
“I was releasing 25 doves behind a horse and carriage, but I was on the blind side of this horse, so I told the driver that the horse may become spooked, and asked if he had control of him? And he said sure – you know, he was this macho guy – so I did my speech and I release the 25 doves and they went around the front of the horse and that horse reared up and took off with the bride and groom in the back of this carriage, over the curb right into a hedge. And the horse was still trying to run and the lower limbs of the tree were grabbing the brides veil – it was ugly.”
Fitzhugh has also released his birds at deeply emotional events.
“The hard ones are when you do a child’s funeral,” he said. “I mean that just tears you up inside. If they ask me to speak, I still choke up and start to cry. I’ve never been able to build up a shell when it comes to that. You’ll hear about a murder, or a suicide and then three days later there you are, right next to the family, right there at the gravesite. You deal with all of their sorrow.”
Fitzhugh has stayed in the business because of high demand.
“Oh there’s a demand for it, but people have to stick with it. You’ve got to give up weekends and time on holidays. If you start making excuses or not showing up, they won’t call you back.”
But even without the business, Fitzhugh would be happy, as long as he has pigeons.
“Just the hobby of having pigeons is fun for me,” he said. “Even just going out there and feeding them in the morning is great. And it keeps me busy.”