Where do those white doves go after they’re released at weddings and funerals?

“They should have been back by now,” Marsha Fredrichs said on a recent Thursday morning from the tandem glider in her Lakeville yard, her eyes trained on the sky.

Marsha was in the perch where she and her husband, John, watch their white doves return home. “Every minute feels like an hour,” she said.

The couple have watched and waited like this thousands of times over the decades, training birds for their ceremonial dove-release business, Wings of Love.

Almost every day, from March through October, these flying symbols of peace, love and spirit practice finding their way back to their home loft. With this skill, they can lend a poignant moment to Twin Cities-area weddings and funerals, including those of Daunte Wright and several I-35W bridge collapse victims.

About 25 minutes earlier, the Fredrichses had released a dozen birds in a parking lot 10 miles north of their home. Now the flock of rock doves (also known as homing pigeons) was running late.

Historically, homing pigeons have been reliable racers and wartime messengers. But each year, the Fredrichses inevitably lose a bird or two. “Every once in a while, one doesn’t come home,” Marsha said. “We don’t know why — if it got lost, if a hawk took it out?”

But a whole flock?

A few more minutes ticked by and still no sign of the birds. Marsha wasn’t so much nervous as resigned to fate. “You can’t do anything about it,” she said.

John got into homing pigeons when he was growing up in Mankato, learning the craft from an uncle who raced them.

In the 1980s, John started training his own racing birds to return to his lofts, which look something like large chicken coops. Starting when the birds are just a few weeks old, he lets them out of the loft to fly around for an hour or so, to get their bearings and learn to navigate the skies.

After a few days of this routine, John puts the birds in a small cage, takes them as far as the front yard and releases them to practice flying back into the loft. From there, he’ll transport them an increasing distance — 2 miles, 5 miles, 10 miles, up to 30 miles or so — and repeat the process. After that, the fastest birds are ready to race. For decades, John’s birds competed through a local pigeon-racing club.

Though “flyers” such as himself are a dying breed, John says, and the sport evokes rooftop coops on New York City tenements in the 1940s, there are still a handful of local racing clubs, and the hobby persists worldwide. “There’s a lot of big money in it,” he said. “It’s real big in Europe.”

John has handled so many birds that when he holds one with its legs tucked between his fingers, he looks as casual as a smoker cradling a cigarette. When he opens the cage door, the birds, too, are creatures of habit. They take a few steps, flap their wings and leap into the air. The flock circles once or twice and then takes off toward home.

Scientists have studied everything from sun flares to sound waves to the Earth’s magnetism to determine how homing pigeons navigate, but have yet to land on a definitive answer. “If you figure that out, you’d be a millionaire,” John said.

The very first time John asked Marsha to take some racers out on a test flight, she feared the birds wouldn’t make it the full 10 miles home and deviated from his instructions.

“When I got home, he goes, ‘Oh, they made good time.’ And I said, ‘Well, only because I let them out halfway.’ "

From then on, she trusted the birds.

But today, the birds were testing her. “They should be here by now,” Marsha said.

“You’d think,” John replied, as he occupied himself by puttering about in the yard. “You never know.”

It was unusual for a whole flock to be so late. “Either something spooked them, or they’re out playing,” John surmised.

“I think it had something to do with how low they were flying, Marsha ventured. “I didn’t like that.”

Driving home after they’d released the birds, the couple spotted the flock flying alongside the interstate — passed them at 70 mph to the flock’s 30 or so. The birds were flying lower than usual, likely due to a headwind. Marsha was worried that they could have hit a bridge, or a wire (what they presumed caused the occasional bird to come home late with a broken leg).

“Were they all pure white?” John asked of the flock they’d spotted. “I thought I saw a gray one.”

“If those weren’t ours, where are ours?” Marsha asked. Who else would have sent a dozen white birds racing down I-35? (There are only a couple other dove-release businesses in the region.)

It wasn’t practical to go out looking for the birds, as you might a lost dog. That’s why the dove-release business is an exercise in patience.

“When you’re waitin’ for ‘em ... ” John began.

“It seems like an eternity,” Marsha said.

John stopped racing birds a few years ago, due to health issues, but the trophies lined up in the basement belie his success. (“I’ve been told that I win more than my share. They were kind of glad when I quit.”)

Racing led to breeding and at one point the Fredrichses had 450 birds in five lofts. (“I go overboard on everything I do,” John admitted.)

Today, the couple have about 60 birds and focus on ceremonial releases. To market their services, they helped found the White Dove Release Professionals association, which vets members to ensure their birds are well cared for and released only in safe conditions.

Though animal activist groups such as PETA are against dove releases, the Fredrichses say they’ve received minimal pushback. Regarding ethics, they discourage people from purchasing pet ring-neck doves, which do not have a homing instinct, for a DIY release, as the birds will likely die in the wild.

But nature poses risks to trained birds, too; in 2014, two white doves released at the Vatican were attacked by a low-flying crow and a seagull.

When the Fredrichses started their dove-release business in the early 2000s, they often did several weddings on busy weekends. Today, they are sometimes hired for birthdays or fundraisers, but most of their work is for solemn events, including the annual Minnesota Fallen Firefighter Memorial Service and Lakewood Cemetery’s Memorial Day ceremony.

It can be emotionally taxing to be so close to grief. “She still gets misty and everything,” John said of his wife.

But the birds taking flight, homeward bound, never ceases to feel like a fresh miracle, Marsha said. “It kind of makes the hair stand up on your neck.”

As does the birds’ arrival at their Lakeville loft. “You’re just sitting there and all of a sudden, here comes the speck out of the sky,” John said.

Out in the front yard, it happened just as John described: All of a sudden, here came 13 specks out of the sky. In an instant, a dozen white birds, plus a gray one, circled overhead.

“They picked up a scrub,” John said, explaining the half-hour delay: The gray bird must have diverted the flock from its route.

After the birds landed, John grabbed the interloper, which was banded with an electronic tracker — an off-course racer, as he’d suspected.

So he did what he always does when this happens: He went to look up the gray pigeon’s owner to help this bird find its way home.