This summer I had an interesting experience with a morning dove.

My girlfriend Alex went out for what was meant to be a quick errand, and then hours passed, and since I had expected her to return much sooner, I gave her a quick call.

Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging...

She didn't pick up.

And then my phone buzzed.

She had sent me a text.

A selfie of her indoors in a hoodie with a morning dove sitting on her shoulder.

I tried to call her again.

She didn't pick up.

I texted, where are you?

What are you doing?

And she texted back, I'm at home.

With another selfie attached,

this one zoomed out to reveal that she was indeed at her childhood home with a morning dove on her shoulder.

Both of them were staring into the camera lens as if I had just asked something rather stupid.

Clearly, she didn't understand the point of my question. Before I knew it, I was driving to a

wildlife rehab facility first thing in the morning with a seemingly tame morning dove,

recently named Dora the Dove, sitting in the passenger seat. Alex ostensibly suspected that

Dora was injured because she didn't seem capable of flying away or something.

I inwardly suspected that Alex had somehow captured and domesticated this bird in order to live out some bizarre Disney-fueled snow-white fantasy.

But the wildlife rehabbers reported that she was, in fact, injured in some way, and they agreed that this animal was being

unusually friendly. They took her, and just this week, actually, I got a call reporting that Dora

...