Damn that Dove!
Talk about a bull in a china shop. It could have been much worse, but still…
Just after the Three Star Owl Open Studio/Camelback Studio Tour came to an end, and I’d put all the remaining wares onto my studio worktables to await packing for the imminent San Diego Bird Festival trip, a big stupid dove — a Eurasian Collared Dove — blundered in on foot through the open door and into the small space, pecking the bricks for imaginary food. It was not a good 
place for it to be; Eurasian Collared Doves belong in my studio as much as they belong in the Western Hemisphere, which is to say, not at all.
<< Eurasian Collared dove. Their monotonous, moronic call is “Duhh, HUNHHH, What?…” (photo A.Shock)
The studio is an add-on plexiglass “lanai” type room, so there’s nothing but windows all around. When the dopey bird realized it was inside, it panicked — even though no one was chasing it — flapping repeatedly against the windows, knocking stuff over, and not getting anywhere near the door, which was still wide open. Test-tiles and miscellaneous small art and found objects festoon the horizontal window-support where it was fluttering, and they rained down on the artwork below, crunchily.
Although several of the falling
items were broken, I was lucky: there was only one serious casualty among the sales items, a nice little turquoise horned lizard box with a road-runner on top, smashed to unpleasantly surgical fragments: a horn here, a beak there, a tail, a foot. Here’s the grisly carnage >>
The dove was luckier: it came to rest, and E was able to gently grab it in his hands and release it outside. It flew away, a little bit alarmed at its unintentional incarceration, but probably mostly disappointed that there wasn’t any millet to be found in that scary clear box. Sigh; one less piece to pack for San Diego.