Sad day� Bailey, our loony ring-necked dove, has flown on to brighter skies.

Bailey was a fifteen-year-old dove whom we inherited from a co-worker of mine a few years ago when her mother moved into a smaller home and couldn�t keep all her birds. His two handles were his missing right eye, and his trademark drunken �woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!� call that sounded more like a sports cheer than the typical cooing dove noise. When we got him he didn�t really have a name, so we spent a few days staring at this one-eyed dove darting his head around, looking at his new surroundings with his good eye. We came close to calling him Odin, but finally settled on Bailey, as he was the precise brownish-cream colour of a nice glass of Irish Cream. Besides, however he lost that eye, it certainly wasn�t as a sacrifice for knowledge; he was pretty, but was rather lacking in the intelligence department.

We couldn�t let him out of his cage to fly, which was a real pity as he was used to having a whole room with branches in it to knock about in. Every time we let him out, he�d take off and fly� leaning ever to the left because that was where he could see. So his straight lines would deteriorate into lazy circles that took him into lamps, mirrors, shelves, and piles of paper. Eventually we clipped his wings and would take him out to sit on our shoulders, which he liked just fine, because he could play in our long hair. He loved to groom my husband�s beard, too. Due to the fact that he was missing an eye, his sense of depth perception was skewed, so he�d sit on his branch and eye the floor of his cage where he�d scattered all his food, screw up his courage, then leap from the perch with that �woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!� as he hurtled to what could be three feet or three inches below him. When he�d hit the cage floor sooner than he expected, the whole contraption would shake, and he�d make a chuckling sound in appreciation for his apparent luck in surviving the treacherous drop.

Lately, however, his drunken cheers had become quieter and less frequent. His enthusiastic daily exercises (consisting of gripping his branch tightly with both feet and flapping his wings as hard as he could, raising clouds of seed dust, fallen feather, and dander) had also grown few and far between. We checked on him daily, and took him out of his cage last week for a long cuddle and a cage-cleaning, and there was nothing wrong with him; it was just finally his time to go. After fifteen years, hey, he was long overdue.

He had a good life, a terrific sense of humour, and brought a smile to many faces. Cheers to Bailey!