Emotional Release

The name is “White Dove Service,” but that is a little white lie.

Oxnard entrepreneurs Steve “Smitty” Smith and Tony Silerio think there is nothing as touching as releasing dozens of beautiful white birds to accent a wedding, graduation or other special event--even a funeral.

But because doves--which symbolize peace, hope, purity and love--are too difficult to train, the men instead use white racing homing pigeons for their hobby-turned-business.

“Basically our job is to make people cry,” Smith said. “If we can make them cry tears of joy at a [wedding], we’ve done our job. If we make them cry tears of sadness at a funeral, we’ve done our job.”

The men started showing up uninvited at parades with 15 birds in a box five years ago. Now they get paid $200 to $300 three or four times a week to release their trained birds during the most important moments of people’s lives.

“We found a way to turn a hobby into a paying hobby,” Smith said.

Two years ago, Albino Barretto Jr. of Oxnard stood next to his father’s casket and released two of White Dove’s homing pigeons while 50 other birds joined them in the air. Just last month, he and his new bride, Martha, held another pair of white pigeons on the steps of Santa Clara Church and initiated a similar release.

“It was kind of like my dad being there,” Barretto said. “I thought it was just one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen.”

Robert Garcia Jr., funeral director of Garcia Mortuary in Oxnard, said as many as half of his clients these days choose to include birds in their memorial services.

“You see a bunch of white doves that are released and it’s very, very powerful,” he said. “There’s no words that need to be spoken after that. You can just look into the sky and draw your own conclusions.”

About 70% of White Dove’s jobs are funerals, predominantly for Latino families. Silerio, who also is a minister at the Temple of Praise in Oxnard and is fluent in Spanish, often stands in front of a casket with one of his birds and tells mourners that they are releasing the deceased from this world, but not from their hearts.

He then lets the pigeon, representing the symbolic paloma blanca (white dove), fly off as Smith releases the rest of the birds from nearby cages. The flock catches up to the lead bird; then they usually circle overhead a few times before flying off together.

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For many Christians, the birds’ release represents “the Holy Spirit, a return of the individual soul to the creator,” Garcia said. “I think it brings the families comfort and closure.”

And no one seems to mind that the birds are not actually doves.

Pigeons belong to the same family as doves and the two look similar, but the dove is smaller and has a more pointed tail. Smith said if he were to release doves, they would just fly to the nearest tree and stay there. Homing pigeons, by comparison, can be trained to circle together in the sky and fly back to their coop. They can make it from Ventura to Oxnard in about 20 minutes.

Besides, “White Pigeon Service” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, the men said, and it’s easy enough to pass off the white pigeons as doves to take advantage of the latter’s romantic connotations.

At the July wedding of Cozette and Randall Holt in Oxnard, one young pigeon with an apparent case of stage fright wouldn’t fly the coop and the sun refused to peek out from behind the clouds to provide backlight for the wings of 50 other birds, but it still looked perfect to everyone there.

Best man Bill Pettus was amazed the birds always returned home.

“How do you train something with such a small brain?” Pettus asked. “You keep them hungry,” Smith replied.

Smith and Silerio raise their birds from birth and teach them by taking them to a not-too-distant spot with older pigeons that know the routine, releasing them and rewarding them with feed upon their return. The next time the men release the birds a little farther from home. Aided by keen eyesight, the pigeons can find their way back from up to 100 miles away.

Janice Lee, founder of the International Dove Release Coordinators Assn., said some racing homing pigeons can find their way home from 900 miles away, but the birds Silerio and Smith use are bred more for their pure white color than for their long-distance ability.

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No matter the amount of training, things don’t always go as planned. A child can run in front of the cages just before the release and spook the birds. Occasionally, a released pigeon never returns, usually because there are hawks around.

Another issue for Smith and Silerio is maintaining their wardrobe. They put themselves in the line of fire with each release and their gray suits invariably come away sprinkled with feathers or something worse.

“If they poop on me that’s OK,” Silerio said. “That’s why we have an account at the cleaners.”

Fortunately for those attending a wedding, funeral or graduation, that rarely happens. Silerio and Smith don’t feed the birds much the day of an event so that they are eager to return home for a feeding.

Funeral guests who have been targeted take it in stride. They usually make a joke about the deceased getting the last laugh.

Smith and Silerio each spend about six hours a week feeding and cleaning up the pigeons’ lofts behind their houses, changing water and scraping droppings.

“Believe me, you have to love them to work with them,” Silerio said.

And both men do. Silerio, 63, began raising birds when he was 7. Smith, 52, got into pigeons 40 years ago. It was their shared passion that brought the men together nine years ago when Smith bought several Birmingham rollers, English pigeons that do aerobatics, from Silerio.

In 1995, at Silerio’s urging, the pair bought 15 white homing pigeons from a friend for $5 each. They spent a month training the fowl and then released them from Silerio’s yard. They watched as 14 of the birds flew off never to return.

That is when the bird men of Oxnard learned that it’s best to buy pairs and raise their offspring from birth to get them to return properly.

Silerio pushed to start a business with the homing pigeons, but Smith had the flair for promotion that got the company off the ground. When the Olympic torch was coming through Santa Barbara in 1996, Smith called the city to try to arrange a release, but a long list of regulations was daunting. Instead, the men just showed up and released their birds. The “oohs,” “ahhs” and applause they received, along with a spot on the local television news that night, convinced them that they could make money at it.

The men now have about 200 pigeons between them. In addition to serving their paying clients, they perform many free releases a year, including at Veterans Day and Memorial Day services at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park in Ventura.

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Earlier this year, the pair released birds from a 52-foot yacht at sea during a memorial service for the 88 victims of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, which crashed off the Ventura County coast in January. And when Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush kicked off a whistle-stop train tour in Oxnard last week, the birds from White Dove were there.

The men aren’t ready to quit their main jobs--Smith owns Smitty Carpet Co. and Silerio is his employee--but they are quite happy with how their side business has taken off.

Smith, Silerio and Lee stress that people shouldn’t be in such a business primarily for the money. It should be about the birds and the customers. Lee, who owns Birds on High White Dove Releases in Calabasas, started the trade association because she was concerned that not everyone treated both groups well enough.

Anybody can let a white bird go, Lee said, but it takes compassion to understand what each client really wants and to capture the symbolism they are looking for. If done right, that success can be its own best reward.

“It allows me to touch people’s lives that I couldn’t in any other way. At a time when they really need it most, I give them that vision of beauty, peace and hope,” Lee said. “There is a spiritual side to this that is really satisfying for me. But it is also something that I am fascinated by and will probably never completely understand--the way the white bird touches the human spirit.”