Artful existence

Booker is spending some mornings at the gallery, from opening until about 1 or so. Today he has been here for more than six hours! He is doing great - that is a record!

It's very quiet on the street in the summer, as it is "off season," and few people come in. H-Mom thinks that gallery-time is good for socialization ... and that the handful of humans who come in and out help Booker perfect some important things like not-rushing-the-door and not-trying-to-barge-out and staying-calm-somewhere-besides-home. These tasks are actually a lot of hard work. When Booker lays down-- IF Booker lays down -- it is only for a short respite from watching out the window.

And then something exciting happens.

These are some of the exciting things that occurred just this week:

• Landscaping crew removed all the pavers in the median with sledgehammers. That made lots of noise.
• Two giant chestnut horses with mounted police clomp-clomped slowly past on the street. These creatures were AMAZING and FRIGHTENING and STRANGER THAN FICTION ... much bigger than raccoon! It was very obvious that Booker has never seen a horse before.
  
• Quite a few people opened the door just to say "HI" to the "DOG." That kind of annoys H-Mom because Booker gets all riled up and it's not even for a s-a-l-e. Sales are important to H-Mom and this is a slow month. That is good for Booker visiting the gallery, but it is not good for H-Mom's bank account.
  
• The "DUCK" drove by. The "DUCK" is a huge amphibious vehicle that hauls tourists up and down the street. We think they go in the water somewhere too. It is very tacky. All the tourists shout "quack quack quack" on command, which is very silly, as they do not look anything like ducks.
• Man-Dad stopped to say hello. He snuck in the backdoor and had Booker totally confused. What was Man-Dad doing HERE? That was fun and very exciting.
• The mailman comes everyday and is becoming a f-r-i-e-n-d!
• Booker got brave and decided that the leather chair is much, much more comfortable than the cement floor.
  

H-Mom has a little dish of snappy-snacks and Booker gets one whenever he gracefully manages the in-and-out of pedestrians. Now Booker comes over to the desk when he has been well-behaved to request his reward.

He still has to wear his citronella collar because sometimes he is a little "tightly wound," as H-Mom is starting to call it. She is sure that it is a Coonhound thing ... and she forgives him for it every single time. "Tightly wound" is kind of a creative personality trait, anyway, right?

Here, let Booker take you for a quick tour. He hasn't peed on a single thing. Booker has great respect for the arts:

After the storm ...

At the gallery yesterday, when H-Mom opened the front door in the afternoon - she saw a hint of sunshine - she knew that Tropical Storm Fay had passed. It didn't matter what the Weather Channel was reporting: the parakeets had returned. They were fiesty, arguing and pushing each other from palm frond to frond. Settling back in after having been so unceremoniously dislodged by the evil weather. (Thank you, Google images ... H-Mom doesn't have a telephoto lens!)

Those of us who live and work in downtown Fort Lauderdale have become pretty oblivious to the troops of green monk parakeets that quarrel in the trees of the Las Olas median, or fly from wire to wire in the alleys.

The brightly colored and loud-voiced birds demand attention from out-of-town visitors. People often stop outside the gallery window, with their heads and cameras turned to the palm trees. The parakeets create quite a bit of excitement. Most Americans have seen parakeets only in pet stores, zoos or Caribbean-themed bars.

Immigrants, monk parakeets are native to South America. The Fort Lauderdale parakeets have descended from birds that were released by their Floridian owners on purpose or by accident. Urban legend contends that many were freed from Parrot Jungle by Hurricane Wilma. They have established stable, feral communities in Fort Lauderdale. The birds are self-sustained breeding colonies, established populations that have easily adapted to Florida’s climate and ecosystems. Birds that seem tame are most likely recently escaped or abandoned pets. Wild birds rarely tolerate people, and can be befriended only with dedicated attention.

Although not native to Florida, here the monk parakeets cause only minor ecological distress. The main problem the birds create is for local utility companies such as Florida Power & Light. They cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to electrical equipment because they often build their large, communal stick nests on electrical transformers. The bulky nests get wet during rainstorms and fall, causing short circuits to electrical transformer boxes.

In the late '60s and 70's, Florida Fish and Wildlife Service attempted to eradicate the wayward parakeets. The effort was abandoned because of the huge scale of the bird invasion. Now, there is a market for captured parakeet chicks. Trapping and selling monk parakeets is legal in Florida because it is a non-native species.

We don't encourage our visitors to climb after parakeet hatchlings, however. Every once in awhile, there is news item on an industrious parakeet hunter who got tangled -- and fried -- in high voltage wires.