OKLAHOMA CITY – When the standard tourist attractions feel too tame, set aside about an hour for the World of Wings Pigeon Center.

Photos by MARTHA SHERIDAN/Special Contributor

Pigeons watch you as you watch them at World of Wings Pigeon Center. Right: Some of the books about the birds on display at the museum.

Its little collection of buildings huddles along a short gravel road. The day we visited, a staffer called out a greeting from the door of the administrative offices. He waved us along to the museum building.

Had we wandered into someone's home by mistake? Since a dog was vigorously barking behind a closed door, we opted to go upstairs and found what looked like private rooms. So we tiptoed back down.

The pigeon center was especially disorienting after spending a couple hours at the nearby National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, with its sweeping architecture, meticulously landscaped grounds, high-tech exhibits and extensive art collection.

Our patience with a comparatively lower-scale museum was rewarded when we found rooms focused on pigeon memorabilia: photographs, books, trophies, clocks, a pigeon skeleton under glass.

Lest you assume that the pigeon center celebrates your basic courthouse-square pigeon, I should point out that this is an American Homing Pigeon Institute museum in honor of a more aristocratic relative produced through selective breeding: the Racing Homer.

We're not talking white-bread, carbo-loaded city pigeons. Racing Homers are feathered athletes. They were once considered one of the fastest, most reliable means of communication. By 1819, breeding created homers capable of flying 200 miles in a day, according to the American Racing Pigeon Union. Homing pigeons are longtime military servants, bearing messages of battles won and lost. The museum has a collection of pigeon corps equipment.

The museum's holdings are drawn from a variety of collections. Visitors are allowed to make photocopies of materials in the resource library for a small fee.

Don't miss the Fancy Pigeon Exhibit. Among the variety of breeds is the parlor rolling pigeon. It doesn't fly but instead performs a feat from which its name is derived: it rolls. Backward.

Then there's the loft housing hundreds of racing pigeons. We stood a short distance away and basked in the soft sounds of cooing and flapping feathers. When a car ventures too close, the birds rise in winged choreography.

Before we left, the staffer who had waved us toward the museum offered to introduce us to Jerry, a pigeon who's happy to stand on a stranger's wrist. His claws gently pressed against my skin. He was nearly weightless and seemed to be made almost completely of feathers.

Pigeons beautiful and fascinating? Who knew?

Martha Sheridan is a Dallas freelance writer.

World of Wings Pigeon Center, Oklahoma City

•Contact: 2300 NE 63rd St.; 405-478-5155; www.pigeoncenter.org.