14 June 1995.

Flag Day.

Seven thirty-five in the evening. Call comes in from a woman whose dog has drug in an injured baby bird. A half hour later, I'm in a house on the five-hundred block of 1st Street. Looking down at this tiny fuzzball, almost lost in a baby playpen in the middle of the living room. There're enough flight feathers to tell what this little thing will grow up to be, amidst all the juvenile, white down.

If it grows up.

A mourning dove.

One foot has been mauled, the toes broken and crooked. And the emerging adult tail feathers chewed off at the base.

But I take the little thing in a box, and bring it home.

It survives the night.

But what to do with it? I mean, it's not like they're rare or anything. Folks hunt mourning doves in most states. No way you can justify driving 115 miles to get one to a rehab center.

Game warden suggests letting eldest son raise it. "Be a good summer project for him."

Even suggests a feeding regimen. Bread, soaked in milk. A smidge at a time.

And so we do.

And fall finds us with a fully grown mourning dove living in our dining room. Complete and intact, except for broken toes, and tail feathers that just never came in right.

Best keep it for the winter. Letting it have exercise flying around the room. Flight is good, but steering is lousy without a proper tail. Landings not so hot, either.

It aims for the heelers, thinking them softer to hit than anything else in the house.

They're none too thrilled.

It loves perching on our warm fingers, often settling down to snuggle against your hand to sleep while you watch television. Or maybe on a shoulder.

One morning the next spring, we awoke to the mournful call of a mourning dove.

"Ahhhh-oooo, oooo, oooo, oo."

Coming from our dining room. He's a male, and he can sing. Calling and watching for any lonely female dove outside the windows. Occasionally getting answering calls. Over time, we learn to speak dove, too. But he still can't steer, nor land on a perch.

He stays.

I cannot express what a joy it is to have someone coo at you, "Aaah-cooo?" as you walk through a room. To be able to call out "Aaaah-oooo, oooo, oooo, oo," as you're doing dishes in the kitchen, and to have someone in the next room answer back.

Often on summer evenings, he would call out "Aaah-cooo?" into the darkness. Seeking reassurance he wasn't alone.

But it will happen no more.

The wife looked at me yesterday evening, with a somber face. "We have a grave to dig tomorrow."

Coo is gone.

Ten years, and eleven months. That's good for almost any bird in captivity, and certainly better than a dove in the wild.

But he never really got to be a dove, you know?

I once seriously considered sending him out on his own. The old "better a single day of freedom than a year of captivity," philosophy of wildlife rahabilitation. But in his condition, it most certainly would have been a single day. Or less.

Is that better than almost eleven years of captivity?

I don't really know.

I know I will miss hearing a mourning dove coo almost every day of the year.

I will miss our short little conversations. I speak to wild doves whenever I can, but mostly they look at me like I have a horrific accent, and I rarely get an answer.

Keeping a wild bird is technically illegal. But in the beginning, I happened to have in my wallet a generic permit that allowed me to possess any wildlife that my duties might require.

Nothing said it had to be dead wildlife.

And it was a game warden that told me to keep the dove. Sounds like "duty" to me.

But over the years, they revised the regulations for such things. For many recent years, Coo has been illegal. So we kept him private. He no longer was out when company came.

There was the time when an out of town warden was visiting, and got treated to a loud mourning dove greeting.

"You have one of those bird clocks?"

Uhhh, no. We have a dove.

But he said nothing, just marveled we kept a dove alive for so many years. That said dove enjoyed the company of people, and commonly roosted on the antlers of my deer mount. A paper towel strategically placed below to collect the inevitable Coo drops.

I would have pitied anyone who dared to try to take that dove from my wife's home.

Every mall we hit called for an obligatory stop at the pet store. Because there were no local suppliers of the crushed walnut shell grit that worked so well in his cage, or the special dove seed mix that he liked.

And raising Coo was a good project for eldest son.

Just little did we know it would span over a decade, almost half his life.

Today his project had one more task.

Digging a grave.

He chose a spot under the blue spruce in the back yard.

Coo enjoyed roosting in our Christmas trees.

His coffin was a metal cookie tin, bedded with crushed walnut shells. A selection of special dove seed mix included.

A dove flew overhead as the circular tin was laid in the hole.

A Eurasian collared dove, not a mourning dove. These immigrants hit town just in the past year or two, and seem to be driving the real doves out.

Coo may have been the last mourning dove in town.

But he didn't mind his alien cousins. Even shortened his song to mimick theirs, starting last summer.

But he still spoke mourning dove to us.

The predicted rain started soon after we replaced the sod. Eldest son remained behind as the wife and I headed in, kneeling beside the grave of his old friend.

Ignoring the cold rain.

I suspect we have no idea how much we will miss our dove. Already the house seems so empty.

So quiet.

Aaah-cooo?