Winged performers
High Drive, a favorite spot for South Hill cyclists, runners and walkers, is also the training ground for another breed of exercise nuts.
These athletes look like white doves, but actually they are racing homing pigeons doing what they like to do best: diving, dipping and cutting through the sky as they make a beeline back home.
About once a week, the birds’ owners, Toni and Ron Bell, round up the flock, place them in wicker-basket cages, head to a spot overlooking U.S. Highway 195, and release the birds into the gloriously open, telephone-line-free space.
In less than 30 minutes, the birds find their way home to Spangle, a 23-mile car ride, beating the Bells every time.
The workout is designed to keep the birds in shape between “performances” at weddings, memorials or other special events. The Bells started their birds-to-go business, called Peaceful Messenger, as a sideline to their full-time jobs nearly four years ago.
“We have to exercise them one time a week,” said Toni Bell, a supermarket deli manager. “A marathon runner wouldn’t go out and run a race without training.”
Exercising is only part of what’s involved in the couple’s hobby business. The Bells, both former Californians who met nearly 20 years ago while living in the Monterey Peninsula area, spend much of their time at other people’s special occasions, particularly during the wedding season.
Recently it was Deer Park. Before that they worked a wedding at Gonzaga University’s Bozarth Mansion, where two birds were released to symbolize the groom’s deceased parents.
“There were 100 people in tears,” Toni Bell said.
Grand openings, like the party on the Davenport Hotel patio in 2002, and memorials, such as the unveiling of the statue of late astronaut Michael P. Anderson, were made that much more special when the birds were released.
The couple started the business by buying two breeders and things took off from there. The inventory count is 68 fliers and nine babies, all living in lofts on the Bells’ five acres near Spangle.
“They all have different personalities,” Ron Bell said as the birds fidgeted and cooed minutes before their High Drive flight.
The Bells have been able to control the pigeon population by replacing the hens’ nest eggs with wooden eggs. But trickery can work for only so long.
“The majority figure it out after a while and kick them out of the nest,” Toni Bell said, “and we start all over again.”
The couple’s turnover rate is every service business’s best scenario: zero.
Whether working a peace vigil in downtown Spokane or a store opening in Spokane Valley, the birds always head back home. Theories explaining their navigational prowess include their detection of magnetic navigation, their astronomical navigation skills and their picking up the unique sounds and smells of their homes.
The Bells’ strain of homing pigeons may look like doves, small and bleach-white, but actual ringneck doves would never make it home from a gig. Although it has become popular to release doves at weddings, doves have no homing instincts.
“We get people calling us and saying, ‘We may have found one of your doves.’ ” Toni Bell said. “But it’s never our birds.”
The Bells explain that lost white birds likely are doves bought at a pet store for the purpose of releasing them at a wedding.
Although the Bells’ business is steady, there’s still room for it to soar. Most of their customers are through word of mouth or from seeing the birds at events. The prices range from $100 to $250, and the business can be reached at 235-4067.
This year, Toni Bell said, six clients called, saying their weddings were being canceled.
“Even if we didn’t have any weddings,” Ron Bell said, “we’d still have the birds. I love ‘em.”