A Naples couple is preparing for another season of weddings by training more than 100 rock doves to fly home when released hundreds of miles away.

Theresa and Frank Brautigam run their own business performing ceremonial dove releases at weddings, funerals and other occasions. After the white birds ascend into the sky, they find their way home to Naples using magnetic forces.

It’s time consuming to take care of the animals and Theresa Brautigam, 79, said she would like to give up the birds to spend several months in the winter somewhere warmer. But she didn’t believe her husband would ever give up the hobby he’s so passionate about.

“He’ll never give it up,” she said. “He might cut down.”

Frank Brautigam, 78, who counts among his past careers opera singing and inspecting power plants, grew up in Holland, where seven out of 10 families keep pigeons, he said. He’s been raising birds himself for most of his life.

His wife, who is originally from Westbrook, said she became interested in the birds through her husband. One time in Indiana, when he was away, she jokingly told him that by the time he came back she would have the birds eating out of her hands. She did, she said with a laugh, and she enjoys having them.

“They’re such beautiful creatures,” she said.

Now the couple works together on the ceremonial dove releases, though it’s a good thing they’re both retired and don’t depend on the business for their primary income. The $250 they charge for a funeral and $350 for a wedding barely covers their expenses, and they had to start charging extra for trips more than 40 miles away.

“We’re doing it for the pleasure of doing it more than anything else,” Theresa Brautigam said. “We didn’t get into it for the money.”

Just like with other businesses, the Brautigams are seeing decreasing demand for their services.

“A wedding is expensive enough as it is, especially when you’re talking about Maine people,” he said.

It’s a time-consuming business, too, as Frank Brautigam spends several hours every day cleaning cages and feeding. Having the birds to care for also means the couple can’t go away together for more than one night.

Before starting the dove-release business, he raced birds. Local racing clubs would bring their flocks together and drive their birds hundreds of miles away to release them. Owners would record when each of their birds arrived back home.

To prepare the birds for the race, Theresa Brautigam said, she and her husband would drive the birds up to 50 miles in every direction and release them. People took great interest in seeing them, she said.

“We started thinking, why not do it as a show for people,” she said.

The couple started a business called On the Wings of Love in 1996. Frank Brautigam dresses up in a tuxedo, brings birds to celebratory and solemn occasions, reads a dedication written by his wife and releases the birds. They ascend into the sky and fly back to their home in Naples.

“They just seem to fit right in to any occasion,” she said.

She personalizes every reading after, for example, speaking to a bride and groom about why they think a dove release would be meaningful.

For a funeral, she said, releasing a small flock of birds can symbolize those who have died before and will greet the departed loved one. For a wedding, having the bride and groom release birds can symbolize them taking off together and starting a new life.

She remembered one particularly emotional service for a young man who had died in one of the planes that crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. Frank Brautigam handed a bird to the mother of the young man and read the dedication Theresa Brautigam had written before the mother let the bird go.

Afterward, the mother hugged her and told her, “You will never know what you did for me,” adding that for the first time she could accept the loss of her son.

Though Frank Brautigam is an experienced actor – he founded the Windham Center Stage Theater – he said he sometimes gets choked up reading the dedications his wife writes.

“You have to put your heart into it,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing, really.”

The birds themselves are rock doves, which are in the homing pigeon family. They mate for life, Theresa Brautigam said, and have symbolized peace for a long time. Both parents care for the young, and the whole community of birds take care of young birds once they leave the nest.

“They become very loyal to each other,” she said.

Theresa Brautigam shows off a scrapbook of photos and newspaper clippings from the ceremonial dove release business she runs with her husband, Frank, in Naples.