The bathing pan: shallow, fresh and morning-timed
Doves bathe with enthusiasm and soak everything around the pan doing it, so the instruction needs to be exact. Tell the sitter to offer a shallow pan — water no deeper than the dove's legs are long — filled fresh each morning, left down for a good soak, then lifted and emptied rather than left standing. A pan left down becomes fouled drinking water, and a dove will drink from whatever is in front of it. If your dove bathes on particular days rather than daily, say which days; if it prefers the pan in a sunny spot on the aviary floor, say where. Placement matters most: on the ground, where a ground-loving bird expects water, not raised on a stand where it will be ignored.
Grit in its own dish, not scattered in the seed
A dove grinds seed in its gizzard and needs grit to do it, so grit is a daily necessity, not an extra — and it only works if the bird can take it freely, a few grains at a time. Instruct the sitter to keep a small, separate grit dish topped up and clean, positioned near the feed but not mixed into it. Grit stirred through the seed gets billed out onto the floor and lost; grit in its own dish gets used. Tell the sitter which grit you use — a soluble shell grit, an insoluble crushed stone grit, or a mix of both — and to replace the dish's contents if it gets fouled rather than just adding more on top. Mark grit clearly as part of feeding, not cage dressing — it is the instruction sitters most often skip.
Feeding rhythm for a ground-feeding bird
Doves feed on the ground, so write the instruction the way the dove eats: seed measured into its dish in the morning, a light scatter on a clean patch of floor if that is your bird's habit, and fresh water in a drinker reachable from the ground. Name the mix plainly — a dove's small-seed blend is quite different from parrot food, and a sitter topping up with any shop seed changes the diet mid-stay. Add the extras your dove expects, such as a little chopped greens, and how often. Tell the sitter a dove feeds calmly in bouts through the day; an untouched dish at midday is normal, but at dusk it is worth a message to you.
The quiet roost: dusk onwards is dove time
Doves settle early and sleep deeply, and the roosting part of the instructions protects the most fragile part of the day. Tell the sitter where your dove roosts — which perch, shelf or corner — and that once the bird settles, the cage is left alone: no late cleaning, no reaching in for a forgotten dish. A dove startled off its roost in the dark can blunder into wire and hurt itself, and repeated disturbance stops it resting properly within days. If the dove lives where household evenings happen, cover what changes at dusk: lights lowered, and the last feed and water check done before the bird settles, never after.
Writing it so a sitter cannot misread it
Lay the whole routine out in the order of the day — morning feed and bath pan, midday water check, grit dish glance, evening feed, then hands-off from roosting time — with each task in one plain sentence. Add where the seed and grit are stored, what to do if the dove is found fluffed and silent on the floor (warmth, quiet, a call to you and your vet), and your number where it will be seen. Keep it to one page; a sitter follows a page and files a booklet. All of it fits on a single page inside your KinsLe Care Pass, where the sitter finds each day's tasks in sequence and nothing is left riding on memory or goodwill.