Eye In The Sky Thermal Drone Pet Rescue

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Eye in the Sky Thermal Drone Pet Rescue — Dedicated to reuniting lost pets with their families using advanced thermal drone technology and a deep understanding of lost pet behavior.

❤️🐾The Nose Knows🐾❤️-The Story of Pepper-Sometimes the simplest recoveries carry some of the most important lessons.When...
08/30/2026

❤️🐾The Nose Knows🐾❤️

-The Story of Pepper-

Sometimes the simplest recoveries carry some of the most important lessons.

When I arrived in Clinton, Illinois, we flew for Pepper.

I spent time with his family, trying to understand what had happened, what they knew, and what might help us determine where Pepper had gone. We searched from the air, but when it was all said and done, we really didn’t have a direction.

North?

South?

East?

West?

We simply didn’t know where Pepper was.

But there comes a point in a recovery when, if the thermal drone doesn’t locate the dog, you still have to make forward progress.

The drone is an incredible tool. I’ve seen firsthand what thermal technology can do in lost-pet recovery.

But it is still just one tool.

And I think that’s something some people may not fully understand about what I do.

I am not just a thermal drone pilot experienced in locating lost dogs.

I am a trapper. I am a Pet Recovery Specialist.

We have thermal drones. We have cellular cameras. We have traps. We have signs. We use scent items, food and water stations.

And maybe most importantly, we have the knowledge and experience to understand which of those tools makes sense for the situation in front of us.

Sometimes the drone finds the dog.

Sometimes a camera gives us the information we need.

Sometimes signs put hundreds of additional eyes along the roads and produce the sighting that changes everything.

And sometimes the answer is a trap sitting quietly inside a garage.

The tool may change. The recovery doesn’t stop.

Something should always be moving the recovery forward.

I believe in being aggressive about recovery—but aggressive in a very low-pressure environment.

And I want to be clear about what I mean by that.

Aggressive recovery does not mean chasing a frightened dog or unnecessarily putting pressure on him.

To me, it means doing everything we possibly can, using every appropriate tool available to us, while at the same time giving that dog the space and time he needs to make critical decisions.

We can be working hard while allowing the dog to slow down.

We can be doing more while asking less of him.

Signs can be going up.

Cameras can be watching.

Scent can be working.

Food and water can be available.

A trap can be waiting.

All while the dog is given the space to move without us constantly pushing him.

Pepper already had a reason to come home.

His family.

We didn’t need to give him a reason.

Our job was to do everything we possibly could to help guide him back home—and to make sure we were ready for him when he got there.

And that’s where something I learned years ago from my friend Charlene Walsh became so important.

The first time I ever met Charlene was on a recovery down in Decatur.

I watched her work.

Before making decisions, she spent time with the owner. She listened. She learned about the dog and tried to understand the circumstances surrounding the disappearance.

And then she did something incredibly simple.

She placed the trap right at the home the dog had gone missing from.

I was watching.

And I was learning.

I don’t know if Charlene realized at the time how much I was taking in that day, but that lesson stayed with me.

And I am incredibly grateful that it did.

A lost dog may travel. He may wander farther than anyone expects. We may have absolutely no idea where he is.

But he knows where home is.

There is another important part of this.

Sometimes lost dogs actually do make it back home.

But if they return and don’t find somewhere they feel safe or secure—somewhere that allows them to settle—they may simply leave again.

You can have the moment you’ve been waiting for and never even know it happened.

So yesterday in Clinton, with no known direction of travel for Pepper, that lesson I learned from Charlene years ago made sense again.

I placed my live trap inside the family’s garage.

We left the garage door open just enough for Pepper to get underneath it and enter if he returned.

But we didn’t simply put a trap in the garage and hope Pepper happened to find it.

We placed used scent items outside the garage door, carrying familiar smells from home. We put food outside as well, and continued those attractants into the garage.

We were doing everything we could to help guide Pepper toward something he already knew.

Home.

Familiar scent.

Food.

His garage.

His family nearby.

And inside, a safe and secure way to make sure that if Pepper came all the way back, he didn’t have an opportunity to wander away again.

Then came the part of recovery that can sometimes be harder than all the activity.

We waited.

The drone had flown.

The plan had been made.

The scent items were out.

The food was in place.

The trap was set.

Now we needed to take the pressure off and give Pepper the space and time to make his own decisions.

At 4:48 AM, the trail camera captured the photograph we had hoped to see.

Pepper had come home.

There he stood.

Inside the trap.

Inside his family’s garage.

Safe.

Right around the 24-hour mark.

And when I look at that photograph, I see much more than a dog standing inside a trap.

I see the importance of scent.

I see the importance of having multiple tools available in a recovery.

I see why sometimes the best thing we can do after working incredibly hard is to back away and give a dog the opportunity to work things out.

And I see something else.

I see Charlene.

Years ago, I stood back in Decatur and watched someone with more experience than me assess a situation and make a simple, thoughtful decision.

She probably had no idea that I would carry that lesson with me.

But I did.

That’s one of the beautiful things about this work.

We learn from the animals.

We learn from the families.

And if we’re willing to watch and listen, we learn from one another.

Then someday, maybe years later, we find ourselves reaching back for one of those lessons when another family needs it.

This time, that family was Pepper’s.

We never did figure out whether Pepper had gone north, south, east or west.

Maybe we didn’t need to.

Because while we were doing everything we could to help guide Pepper home, Pepper was doing his part too.

He was finding his way back to the people he loved.

The Nose Knows. ❤️

⸻

The help I provided to Pepper and his family came at no cost to them because of their current financial circumstances.

I want people to understand something about that because it is important to me.

I will not turn a family away simply because they cannot afford my help.

I have never billed or invoiced a single family for the work I do.

I ask for support, but it is not a demand.

My philosophy is simple:

Give what you can, if you can.

Some families are able to contribute toward the cost of their recovery. Some aren’t.

Their ability to pay will never determine whether they or their pet deserves my best effort.

And that’s one of the reasons I am so grateful for everyone who supports Eye in the Sky Thermal Drone Pet Rescue.

When you donate, sometimes you’re helping a family you will never meet.

Your support helps put fuel in the van. It puts the drone in the air. It puts cameras in the field and signs along the roads. It keeps traps available and all of the other tools of recovery ready for the moment they’re needed.

And sometimes your support helps put a trap inside a quiet garage, with familiar scents leading toward it and the door cracked open just enough, waiting for one little boy to find his way home.

This time, his name was Pepper.

And at 4:48 in the morning, he did. ❤️

Eye in the Sky Thermal Drone Pet Rescue
Reuniting pets with their families.

https://venmo.com/u/Eye_In_The_Sky

https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/8DSNM6CFXQSAN

Mail to:
Eye In The Sky
2207 Woodfield Road
Bloomington, IL 61704



🐾❤️ Olaf - Biggsville, IL ❤️🐾Yesterday, I traveled to Biggsville, Illinois, to help a family searching for Olaf, a Great...
08/27/2026

🐾❤️ Olaf - Biggsville, IL ❤️🐾

Yesterday, I traveled to Biggsville, Illinois, to help a family searching for Olaf, a Great Pyrenees who hadn’t been part of their family for very long.

Olaf was recently adopted.

But sometimes it doesn’t take very long for a dog to figure out where he belongs.

The family had been doing something with Olaf that probably seemed like nothing more than part of everyday life.

They walked him.

They took him around their neighborhood regularly, allowing him to experience the world surrounding his new home.

During those walks, they had noticed something about Olaf.

His attention could be grabbed pretty easily by rabbits, squirrels, and other little creatures that caught his eye.

Then one day, something apparently caught his attention a little too much.

Olaf jumped through a window screen and took off.

When I arrived, I spent a lot of time talking with the family before deciding how I wanted to approach the search.

I wanted to understand Olaf.

How was he adjusting to his new family?

What was his nature?

Was he comfortable there?

What did they see when they walked him?

How did he react to people?

What would cause him to leave?

Those conversations matter.

Every lost dog is different, and understanding why a dog left can sometimes be just as important as knowing where he was last seen.

The more I listened, the more comfortable I became with one thought:

Olaf didn’t want to leave this family.

Nothing they told me suggested that.

Instead, I believed that for one brief moment, Olaf saw something he simply couldn’t resist investigating.

He wasn’t necessarily running away from home.

He was running toward something interesting.

That’s a very important distinction.

And based on everything I learned about Olaf, my feeling was that he wouldn’t be very far away.

There were a lot of things working in his favor.

First was his size.

Olaf is a Great Pyrenees. I didn’t have the same concerns about predator threats that I would have with a small dog.

He was also comfortable being outside.

And Olaf has a wonderful nature about him.

He’s a kind, gentle, big baby who will happily and easily walk up to someone and say hello.

That matters in a lost-dog recovery.

Some dogs, once they’re loose and frightened, become extremely difficult to approach. They may avoid people, run from anyone trying to help, and sometimes even run from their own family.

From everything I learned about Olaf, that wasn’t the dog I believed we were dealing with.

He also had something I sometimes think of as country-dog sense.

I’ve thought about this through many recoveries.

Dogs that are accustomed to being outside—walking, exploring and experiencing the world beyond the inside of a house or the boundaries of a backyard—often seem to keep their wits about them a little differently when they suddenly find themselves on their own.

As humans, we might call it being street smart.

I’ve seen just how powerful that can be.

I saw it with Cassie in Decatur.

Cassie came from the tragedies in Puerto Rico and had spent years as a Puerto Rican street dog. She was incredibly intelligent, resourceful and street smart.

In Cassie’s case, those survival skills made the recovery more difficult.

She knew how to survive.

And she knew how to elude us.

Olaf wasn’t Cassie. His personality was completely different. But that experience reinforced something I had already thought about extensively long before I ever met Olaf:

A dog’s experience with the world matters when that dog becomes lost.

And when Olaf’s family told me that they regularly walked him throughout the neighborhood, it made me even more confident that he had a good chance of finding his way back.

Because Olaf’s familiar scent landscape wasn’t confined to four walls or even just a backyard.

It stretched throughout the neighborhood.

Every walk had given him an opportunity to experience the smells surrounding his home.

The streets.

The yards.

The trees.

Other animals.

People.

Houses.

Intersections.

And thousands of other scents that we probably never even notice but that a dog’s nose is constantly processing.

All of that becomes part of the world a dog knows.

I’ve thought about how to explain this in a way that makes sense.

Imagine trying to find a cup of water.

Now imagine trying to find a swimming pool.

That’s how I think about the advantage Olaf had.

If the only familiar scent an animal knows is concentrated around one house or one backyard, you’re asking that animal to locate a relatively small target.

But if that dog has regularly traveled throughout the surrounding neighborhood, his known scent landscape is much larger.

Instead of a cup of water, you’ve given him a swimming pool.

The larger his known area is, the wider that familiar scent column can potentially become, giving him more opportunities to encounter something recognizable, orient himself toward his neighborhood and eventually work his way back toward home.

That’s why there is something in Olaf’s story that I believe every dog owner should consider.

Walk your dog.

Get them out of the house.

Get them around the block.

Let them smell.

Let them experience their neighborhood.

Let them learn the world surrounding their home.

You’re giving them exercise and enrichment, absolutely.

But you may also be giving them something you never expect them to need.

A way to recognize home from farther away.

Of course, we weren’t going to simply sit back and wait for Olaf to figure it out.

We went to work.

The family and I put together six large road signs.

Once all six were completed and ready, they headed out to place them throughout the area.

I also made another 35 flyers with Olaf’s picture and contact information.

Those could be handed out to local businesses, homes and anyone else willing to take the information.

Every flyer meant another person who might recognize that big white dog.

Another set of eyes looking for Olaf.

I also told the family to bring the inside of their house outside.

Used clothing.

Food.

Familiar items.

Anything carrying the smells Olaf associated with his new family and his new home.

If he was nearby, I wanted to give him every possible opportunity to recognize where he belonged.

And while all of this was happening, there was another member of Olaf’s family who desperately wanted to be there.

Dad is a truck driver.

He was away from home.

I could hear how concerned he was about Olaf, but I could also hear how concerned he was about his family.

That kind of helplessness is difficult.

It’s one thing to have your dog missing when you’re standing there searching.

It’s another thing entirely to be miles away, knowing the dog your family has already grown to love is somewhere outside and knowing the people you love are back home trying to find him.

You want to help.

You want to protect them.

You want to fix it.

But sometimes your responsibilities have you somewhere else.

All you can do is wait for the phone to ring.

Yesterday, we did everything we could to give Olaf an advantage.

We learned everything we could about him.

We got signs on the roads.

We put 35 more flyers into the community.

We brought the smells of home outside.

And I remained confident in something his family had already been giving Olaf long before he ever went missing.

They had been teaching him his neighborhood.

Then today, Olaf answered the question everyone had been asking.

Where are you, buddy?

Olaf came home.

He wound up on his family’s porch.

Not running past the house.

Not wandering farther away.

Not needing someone to capture him.

Olaf was sitting on the porch, waiting to be invited back inside.

There is no way for any of us to know exactly what Olaf smelled along the way, what he recognized or what ultimately guided him back. I won’t pretend that we can know that.

But I do know what I believed after sitting with his family yesterday.

Olaf wasn’t trying to leave them.

Something caught his attention.

For one brief moment, curiosity won.

Then the adventure happened.

But Olaf had some things going for him.

He was big.

He was comfortable outdoors.

He was friendly.

He knew people weren’t necessarily something to fear.

He had experience with the world around him.

And perhaps most importantly, his understanding of home extended far beyond the walls of the house.

His family had walked him.

Around the block.

Down the streets.

Through his neighborhood.

They had unknowingly spent all that time giving Olaf a map.

And when the time came that he actually needed it, somehow, some way, Olaf found his way back.

There is something especially beautiful about that when you’re talking about a recently adopted dog.

Because you can give a dog a house.

You can give him food.

You can give him a bed.

You can give him a family.

But home is something he has to decide for himself.

Today, Olaf sat on that porch waiting for the door to open.

I think he made his decision pretty clear.

Welcome home, Olaf. 🐾❤️

The services provided to Olaf’s family came at no cost to them.

That is possible because of the people who continue to support the work of Eye in the Sky Thermal Drone Pet Rescue.

If this story touched you and you would like to support what I do, your support is always greatly appreciated. It helps keep this work sustainable—the fuel, signs, flyers, equipment, cameras and countless other expenses that allow me to answer the next call.

Every contribution, share, comment and word of encouragement helps me continue getting to the next family, the next search, and the next someone who is loved and needs help finding their way home.

Thank you for continuing to believe in this work and for helping me Bring Lost Pets Home.

https://venmo.com/u/Eye_In_The_Sky

https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/8DSNM6CFXQSAN

Mail to:
Eye In The Sky
2207 Woodfield Road
Bloomington, IL 61704



🐷❤️Love Knows No Bounds❤️🐷The story of MargeLogan called me sometime mid-morning.His father Dirk’s KuneKune pig, Marge, ...
08/24/2026

🐷❤️Love Knows No Bounds❤️🐷

The story of Marge

Logan called me sometime mid-morning.

His father Dirk’s KuneKune pig, Marge, was missing.

But calling Marge “Dirk’s pig” only tells part of the story.

Marge was a family pig.

She belonged to all of them in the way that really matters.

She was loved.

And this wasn’t a little pig.

Marge weighed somewhere around 390 pounds.

I suppose to some people, hearing that a nearly 400-pound pig was missing might bring a smile. Maybe even a little disbelief.

How does something that big simply disappear?

And maybe, to some, the urgency of finding her wouldn’t make much sense.

After all, she’s a pig.

But I had learned something about that kind of thinking not all that long ago.

Her name was Sweet Caroline.

Some of you may remember her from a story I wrote called “Structure and The Rachel — The Story of Sweet Caroline.”

Sweet Caroline was a Dexter cow I searched for in Iowa. Her owner, Scott, loved her deeply. I knew that before I ever met him. I could hear it in his voice.

That recovery took three trips.

There were long drives, uncertainty, frustration, a downed tree, two cattlemen named Jostan and Blake, and somehow, in the middle of everything, an unidentified sandwich we came to know as The Rachel.

It’s still one of my favorite stories.

But what stayed with me most wasn’t how we ultimately got Sweet Caroline into a trailer.

It was Scott.

It was seeing what that cow meant to him.

Someone looking from the outside might have seen livestock.

Scott saw Sweet Caroline.

And somewhere during those three trips, I began to understand the difference.

So when Logan called about Marge, I understood.

This wasn’t about finding a pig.

Marge was missing.

Marge had a home. She had a family. She had a sister named Daphne.

And when I say sister, I don’t mean another pig that happened to share the same barn.

I mean her sister.

There are photographs of Marge and Daphne curled up together, nose-to-nose, in their comfortable barn. In another, a chicken stands comfortably on Marge’s back while she rests, as though neither of them could imagine anything unusual about it.

Those pictures tell you more about Marge than 390 pounds ever could.

They tell you who she is.

They tell you about her life.

And they tell you something about the family that loves her.

Marge wasn’t simply an animal kept on the property.

She belonged there.

By the time I arrived, the heat of the day presented a problem.

Thermal drones work by detecting differences in temperature. When the ground, trees and vegetation have spent an entire day absorbing heat, an animal can become much harder to distinguish.

There are times when the best decision you can make with a thermal drone is not to fly it.

So I decided to wait.

I would come back after dark.

As evening settled in and the landscape began giving up the heat it had absorbed during the day, I returned and put the drone into the sky.

Now the world looked different.

Through the thermal camera, details that had been hidden during the heat of the day began revealing themselves.

There were sprayer tire tracks running through the field, and I began following those tracks with the drone.

Farther out than anyone expected, something appeared on my screen.

A heat signature.

I moved closer.

There she was.

Marge.

Alive.

I remember the relief of being able to say the words:

“She’s alive. She’s good.”

Dirk called Logan.

And before long, a father and son were headed out to bring Marge home.

Back to the family that had been worried about her.

Back to Daphne.

Back to that comfortable barn where two sisters could once again curl up nose-to-nose.

Home.

And maybe that’s where this story could end.

A thermal drone went up.

A missing pig was found.

Marge went home.

But that’s not really why this one stayed with me.

Because somewhere out there, while looking for a 390-pound KuneKune pig, I found myself thinking again about a Dexter cow named Sweet Caroline.

And about Scott.

Sweet Caroline had taught me something.

Marge reminded me.

We have a tendency to put animals into categories.

Dogs are pets.

Cats are pets.

Cows are livestock.

Pigs are livestock.

And then, without even realizing it, sometimes we begin assigning value to the love that comes with those labels.

We understand someone searching all night for their dog.

We understand someone crying over their cat.

But a cow?

A pig?

Maybe that’s where we’re wrong.

Maybe the mistake is believing that we get to decide which relationships deserve that kind of love.

Because who are we to decide what another living being is allowed to mean to someone?

Who are we to judge who—or what—another person loves?

I had seen the answer before.

To somebody else, Sweet Caroline was a cow.

To Scott, she was Sweet Caroline.

And now I was seeing it again.

To somebody else, Marge might be a 390-pound pig.

To Dirk, Logan and their family, she is Marge.

She’s the pig a chicken can comfortably stand on.

She’s the sister Daphne curls up beside.

She’s the one whose absence leaves an empty place in a comfortable barn.

And she’s the one whose family went looking for her because someone they loved hadn’t come home.

That’s really all we ever need to understand.

Maybe love knows no bounds because love doesn’t ask for our approval.

It doesn’t care whether the one we love sleeps at the foot of our bed, stands in a pasture, or curls up nose-to-nose beside her sister in a comfortable barn.

It doesn’t measure affection in pounds.

It doesn’t recognize the categories we create.

And it certainly doesn’t ask permission.

Sweet Caroline taught me that.

Marge reminded me.

Love knows no bounds.

⸻

As always, I appreciate everyone who follows these stories, shares them, encourages me, and supports the work of Eye in the Sky Thermal Drone Pet Rescue.

Your support is what helps make this work sustainable. It puts fuel in the vehicle, batteries in the air, equipment in the field, and allows me to answer the next call when it comes.

Because there will always be another call.

Another family searching.

Another Marge.

Another Sweet Caroline.

And the next something who is loved and needs help getting home.

Thank you for helping me get to them.

Reuniting lost pets with their families.

https://venmo.com/u/Eye_In_The_Sky

Mail to:
Eye In The Sky
2207 Woodfield Road
Bloomington, IL 61704

https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/8DSNM6CFXQSAN



🍀❤️🐾Life With Purpose🐾❤️🍀Sometimes you don’t understand why you’re being sent somewhere until after you arrive.Yesterday...
08/23/2026

🍀❤️🐾Life With Purpose🐾❤️🍀

Sometimes you don’t understand why you’re being sent somewhere until after you arrive.

Yesterday, I was called to Schaumburg, Illinois, to help recover a lost dog named Nuggy.

Nuggy had been staying at a boarding facility when he got loose. I was called to assist the people at the facility with his recovery.

That’s why I made the drive to Schaumburg.

At least, that’s the reason I knew about when I left home.

That’s where I met Mike.

As we worked together and waited for information about Nuggy, Mike and I began talking.

At first, it was about the dog—the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, where he might have gone, what information we had, and what we could do to bring him safely back.

It was the kind of conversation I’ve had countless times on lost-dog cases.

But somewhere along the way, the conversation changed.

Mike told me that just three weeks earlier, he had lost his son.

His name was Colin.

Colin had died in a tragic car accident.

Then Mike told me the date.

July 25.

My birthday.

I remember hearing that date and feeling something inside me shift.

I’ve had a lot of these moments lately—moments that feel like affirmations, when one thing connects to another in a way that has become increasingly difficult for me to dismiss.

I wrote about that recently in Signs, the story of Burnsy.

I’ve learned to pay attention when they happen.

So I listened.

And Mike told me about Colin.

Colin was a car guy.

But the longer Mike talked, the more I realized that cars weren’t really what he was telling me about.

He was telling me about his best friend.

His son.

Mike and Colin would travel several states away together to pick up vehicles. They’d make road trips out of it, bring the cars home, work on them together and eventually sell them.

Those trips weren’t really about buying and selling cars.

They were about the miles in between.

A father and his son together in a vehicle.

Gas stations.

Meals on the road.

Hours of conversation.

Working side by side when they got home.

The kind of ordinary moments we rarely recognize as extraordinary while we’re living them.

A father and son believing there would always be another car.

Another project.

Another road trip.

And now there won’t be.

Three weeks later, I was standing with Mike because a dog named Nuggy had gotten loose.

And somehow, while we were trying to bring that dog home, Mike and I found ourselves talking about Colin.

Mike also told me about his other sons.

Their family has been involved in racing, and Mike wants to take his boys to a drag strip.

Not because he wants to encourage them to drive fast.

Exactly the opposite.

He wants them to understand what racing is supposed to be.

A sanctioned track.

Rules.

Safety equipment.

People who understand horsepower and respect what it can do.

He wants his sons to see that there is a place for speed, competition and racing.

The street isn’t it.

Then Mike told me about something even bigger.

Out of the worst pain imaginable, he wants to do something that might prevent another family from experiencing it.

He is beginning the work of trying to create a nonprofit—something that can use Colin’s story to reach other young people and perhaps prevent another tragedy like the one that took his son.

A way to turn unimaginable loss into something that might save someone else’s life.

And then Mike said something I don’t think I will ever forget.

“No one should feel the way I feel.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

There are some kinds of pain you can’t fix with words.

But there was something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Because less than 24 hours earlier, I had been in Dixon, Illinois.

Another call.

Another lost dog.

Another family I never would have met if an animal hadn’t gone missing.

The Mulligan family.

And the Mulligans are a racing family.

I had the privilege of spending some time with Pat Mulligan, whose family is deeply involved in drag racing and has competed successfully at the national level.

That was the night before.

And now, less than 24 hours later, I was standing in Schaumburg listening to a grieving father tell me that he wanted to introduce his sons to exactly that world.

Not street racing.

Not reckless speed.

Real racing.

A place where horsepower is respected.

Where speed is controlled.

Where racing has rules, structure, safety and purpose.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

The night before, a lost dog had taken me to Dixon and introduced me to a racing family.

The very next day, another lost dog had taken me to Schaumburg and put me beside a father who wanted to introduce his sons to that very same world.

Two families who didn’t know each other.

Two lost dogs.

Two Illinois towns.

Less than 24 hours apart.

And somehow, I was standing in the middle.

There is no doubt in my mind that I was there for a reason.

And while Mike and I were having these conversations, the search for Nuggy was still happening.

Then came the news we had been waiting for.

Nuggy had been found.

He had wandered into someone’s backyard.

Once the homeowner realized there was a loose dog there, the gate was securely closed behind him. Nuggy was contained, brought into the garage and kept safe until we could get there.

The uncertainty was over.

Nuggy was safe.

And that’s important.

I don’t want to take anything away from that recovery or pretend Nuggy wasn’t the reason I drove to Schaumburg.

He was lost.

People were worried about him.

I went there to help bring him home.

And while I was there, he was found, contained and safely recovered.

That was one reason I was there.

But there is no doubt in my mind it wasn’t the only one.

Because had Nuggy been found before I ever left home, I probably never would have made that drive.

I never would have met Mike.

I never would have heard about Colin.

I wouldn’t know about those road trips between a father and his son.

I wouldn’t know that Colin was a car guy.

I wouldn’t know about Mike’s plans for his other boys.

I wouldn’t know about his desire to take something unimaginably painful and somehow use it to prevent another family from experiencing the same thing.

And I never would have heard a grieving father say:

“No one should feel the way I feel.”

Most importantly, I might never have realized that a family I had met less than 24 hours earlier could potentially become part of what Mike was searching for now.

Later, Mike’s girlfriend returned.

By then, Mike and I had spent quite a bit of time talking.

About Colin.

About his boys.

About cars.

About racing.

About grief.

About what happened.

And about what Mike hoped could somehow come from all of it.

Mike looked at her and said:

“Philip is here for a reason.”

He didn’t know everything that had already been going through my mind.

He didn’t know how strongly I had been thinking about the Mulligan family.

He didn’t know that I had already begun connecting the dots between Dixon the night before and Schaumburg that day.

But he said it anyway.

“Philip is here for a reason.”

I didn’t have to wonder.

He was right.

I was.

There is no doubt in my mind.

Maybe that sounds strange to someone reading this.

That’s okay.

I’ve experienced enough lately that I don’t need every moment explained anymore.

Sometimes I simply need to recognize it when it happens.

Burnsy reminded me to pay attention to the signs.

I’m paying attention.

The night before, a lost dog took me to Dixon and introduced me to the Mulligans.

The next day, another lost dog took me to Schaumburg and introduced me to Mike.

Now those two roads need to meet.

I want to connect Mike and his sons with the Mulligan family.

Maybe it’s simply an afternoon at a drag strip.

Maybe it’s Mike’s boys standing beside people who can show them that you can love cars, love horsepower and love racing while still understanding how unforgiving all three can be when they’re taken to the wrong place.

Maybe it’s a conversation between two fathers.

Maybe Mike’s boys hear something that stays with them for the rest of their lives.

Maybe something Mike is trying to build in Colin’s memory eventually reaches one young person at exactly the right moment.

And maybe someday, because of something that began here, another father gets to make one more road trip with his son.

I don’t know.

That part of the story hasn’t been written yet.

I can’t change what happened on July 25.

I can’t bring Colin back.

I can’t take away the pain of a father who lost his son and his best friend.

But maybe I can make an introduction.

Maybe I can connect two families whose paths otherwise may never have crossed.

Maybe something good can grow from something unimaginably painful.

And maybe that’s part of what we’re supposed to do when these connections are placed in front of us.

Notice them.

Honor them.

And do something with them.

Yesterday, I drove to Schaumburg because a dog named Nuggy was lost.

While I was there, Nuggy was found and safely recovered.

That mattered.

That was one reason I was there.

But it wasn’t the only one.

A father needed to tell me about his son.

I needed to hear him.

And somewhere between Dixon and Schaumburg, between two lost dogs, two families and a world of racing that connected them before either family even knew the other existed, the next step became clear.

Finding lost animals has given me something far greater than a reason to put a drone in the sky.

It has given me the privilege of entering people’s lives at moments I never could have planned.

And every once in a while, I’m reminded that the animal we’re searching for may only be the beginning of the reason our paths crossed.

Mike said I was there for a reason.

There is no doubt in my mind that I was.

Now that I know the reason, I have a responsibility to do something with it.

To make the connection.

To see where it leads.

And to keep paying attention when life reminds me that sometimes there is something much bigger happening than the reason I thought I showed up.

Life with purpose.

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2207 Woodfield Road
Bloomington, IL
61704

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+13097066647

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