Get your life preservers

Last week at high tide, the Atlantic washed over the seawall along A1A. The ocean was surging in the wake of the storm that hit North Carolina. At 8 in the evening, the street was swamped. Seaweed and sand roiled along the sidewalk.

When the tide receded, all that remained was a sandy skimcoat to remove with backhoes and streetsweepers. Everything was "back to normal" by mid-morning. We were actually hoping to splash in the ocean along the street for our morning walk, but no such luck.

Dogs are not allowed on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, except for a few very limited evening hours, three days a week on a 1/2-mile stretch of ocean at Sunrise. We purchased a permit to walk on the west sidewalk before 9am, so there is no sand between Booker's toes, only the temptation of salty ocean breeze and the sound of the surf.

The sky

H-Mom is back. She had a difficult trip, but it is a trip that has made her thankful for a lot of things. Like being home. Like having a family. Like having a dog.

Like walking in the morning and watching the sun come up. Like appreciating the clouds, and the calm, and the vastness of the sky.

She is already looking forward to that bit of peace tomorrow morning.

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.

Rainy Season

In southern Florida during the rainy season, the weather usually moves fairly quickly from the west to the east, so if it's raining by Man-Dad's office, he calls and then we know that if we want to get a good walk in, we better get moving.


If this is what the sky looks like, we pick up the pace to get our business done. Sometimes you can see the rain coming, it's a sheet of gray coming down from the dark clouds to the ground.



Fort Lauderdale is known as the "Venice of America" because there are more than 300 miles of navigable water, including the Intracoastal Waterway, the New River and a myriad of canals, working their way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Everglades.

We live right on the New River, and one of the best dog walks is along the Riverwalk, which runs a few miles along both the south and north sides of the New River, in downtown Fort Lauderdale. We cross the drawbridges at Andrews and at 3rd to get around, which makes downtown living convenient even though the New River passes right through the city.












We start out by going under the drawbridge. If it starts to pour, we can hang out there for a bit so we don't get soaked. We walk up one side of the New River.


Then we have to walk over the drawbridge. The cars and trucks make a very odd, deep rumbling noise when they drive over, but Booker is very tolerant. It's easy to be happy when you are going for a walk, as long as there is no thunder!

We walk back down the other side, and over another drawbridge. If there is a tall boat, the bridge goes up and everyone has to wait. Booker thinks that part is very boring, and it's usually at the end of the walk when we are both dragging from the humidity anyway. Note the huge yawn ...