PHOENIX – Every morning in the cool of dawn, before the sun rises over the shrubs and strip malls of the desert valley, the former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson shuffles out into the backyard of his modest ranch home and into his last prized possession: his pigeon coop.

Inside are more than 200 of his closest friends. They have royal pedigrees from breeders in Germany, Russia, and France, and come with feathers colored vanilla, chocolate with spots, and mother of pearl. It is 5:30, and Tyson listens to them coo and caw as they cool themselves in the dark silence of the morning.

“My sanctuary,” he said.

Through it all – the titles, the millions, the divorces, the arrests, the rape trial, the biting, the bankruptcy, and so much more – Tyson’s birds have been one of few stable forces in his turbulent life.

Perhaps they have been the only stable force.

With graying specks of stubble peppering his beard, a wounded knee and other ailing body parts, Tyson (50-5, with 44 knockouts) is attempting another late-career comeback that might clear several million dollars in debts. On June 11 in Washington, he faces a opponent known for the inviting size of his jaw, Kevin McBride (32-4-1, with 27 knockouts) of Brockton, Mass.

It will be Tyson’s third fight in last three years, of which two have ended in losses by way of knockout. Win or get knocked out again, Tyson said he’ll always keep what makes him most content in life: the birds that breed, fly, make a mess of his lawn, and fight each other like boxers to secure a choice perch in his coop.

“If I didn’t have these birds I don’t know what I’d do,” Tyson said last week. “When I got hard times, when I get depressed, when I have a bad day, you just come back here and boom! You forget everything. … That’s why I keep them.”

Tyson isn’t the only fighter to maintain a menagerie, although he said his Siberian tigers were taken from him after one attacked a woman. The history of prizefighters and the animals they love goes at least as far back as the early 20th century. Along the streets of Paris in the 1920s, it was difficult for onlookers not to notice the light heavyweight champion Battling Siki, who “would parade the boulevards with a pair of tame lions and an untamed blonde, occasionally firing a pistol to attract attention,” a boxing historian, Bert Sugar, wrote in the book “100 Years of Boxing.”

In New York, too, the relationship between fighters and pets is part of boxing lore. Perhaps the most graceful of boxing scribes, A.J. Liebling, observed in a 1955 essay that the caliber of a fighter could be measured by the animal he owned. Liebling wrote that a pet shop was located underneath the famed Stillman’s Gym, and purses were quickly spent.

“A boy wins a four-rounder, he buys a parakeet and dreams of the day he will fight on top and own a monkey,” Liebling wrote. “Floyd Patterson, a brilliant star on the light-heavyweight circuit, owns a cinnamon ring tail. Whitey Bimstein, the famed trainer, had one of the pet shop monkeys hooking off a jab pretty good for a while.”

And there was the fictional longshoreman and failed fighter Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando in the 1954 film “On the Waterfront.” The rooftop dialogue was written by boxing aficionado Budd Schulberg, who won an Oscar for the screenplay.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be so interested in pigeons,” Terry’s love interest, Edie, says in the film, as Brando tells Eva Marie Saint about the dangers facing pigeons.

“You know this city’s full of hawks? That’s a fact,” Terry says, explaining that his pigeons battle each other for top perch.

“Even pigeons aren’t peaceful,” Edie says.

“There’s one thing about them though,” Terry says. “They’re very faithful.”

It is no accident that fighters gravitate toward animals.

“In this case the dog becomes more than a man’s best friend,” Mr. Sugar said. “The prizefighter lacks what other athletes may take for granted: a team. It’s not like in basketball or baseball or soccer where there’s all these other guys to pal around with.

“The fighter talks to his pigeons because he can’t talk with others,” the historian said, pointing out that one of the finest fighters of his generation, the former light-heavyweight champion Roy Jones Jr., keeps a steady stable of fighting roosters and dogs.

“Most fighters are gentle and lonely people,” Mr. Sugar said. “Maybe pets are their pacification. Maybe it soothes them. Edna St. Vincent Millay once said that music soothes the savage beast – maybe it’s the savage beast that soothes the prizefighter.”

Tyson, who is 38, started raising pigeons when he was 8. At night or early in the morning, Tyson said, he would walk up to the roof his building in Brownsville and watch other men tend to their coops or flying their birds in circles by waving large flags.

“Some of these Italian guys would pay me $1, or maybe $2, to go and clean the coops,” Tyson said. “After a while I was like, forget the money, could I have this bird?”

At first he didn’t have enough birds to build a coop. “I kept a cage outside the window of my room,” he said. “Now look at me. I’m like those guys at the horse track that can’t stay away. I’m addicted. … I am a degenerate.”

In flusher times Tyson kept a coop of more than 3,200 birds in Harlem, he said, all tumblers – pigeons that suffer seizures when they fly so it looks as though they are doing small flips in the air. Some of his birds tumble so hard they fall from the sky and land in the street and die, or drop in a neighbor’s swimming pool and drown.

Lately, Tyson said, his pigeons have been fatally landing on a short-circuit in a nearby telephone wire. To keep the birds off the wire, Tyson uses a gnarled-up tennis shoe. And to prevent ordinary Arizona pigeons from breeding with his birds and contaminating their gene pool and pedigree, Tyson uses a BB gun.

None of his birds has a name.

“I try not to get attached,” Tyson said.

His hobby costs him about $1,500 a month. “I take better care of these birds than I take care of myself,” he said.

Why? Tyson can’t explain the addiction. “The guys who fly birds are very strange people,” he mused. “Most of them are antisocial. Most of them don’t like certain people. Like me. They stay away from other people and stick to their birds. It’s their sanctuary.”

He shrugs off the exotic car collections, the motorcycles, the mansions, the minks, and all the bling-bling of his wild past as materialistic abstractions that kept him in a state of chaos and distracted him from achieving focus, responsibility, and peace.

“This is really what’s happening,” Tyson said, looking up at his birds high above the sleeping suburbs, flying in concentric circles, doing back flips, front flips, a circus of small seizures, a moving cloud of fluttered wings in the first light of day.

“This is really what’s going on, you know, from a human perspective,” Tyson said, his thick neck craned.