‘Mr. Dovely’ and his fabulous flying flock

Local area pigeon flyer Clint Fitzhugh has made a career out of his all-white doves

By Geoff Pursinger

The Times, Nov 19, 2009

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.

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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.”

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