Where's the love for Cameron Fritzson?
The poor fellow suffered a high-voltage mishap while hot on the trail of an invasive and damned near ubiquitous exotic species. Yet his plight generated little public sympathy.
Of course, trespassing engenders an obvious public relations issue. Fritzson almost fried himself Monday after climbing into an FPL substation in Pembroke Pines.
But Fritzson has this other image problem. He's a bird catcher. He scaled the substation fence to steal baby birds from a nest of monk parakeets, an ostensibly legal pursuit (unless you happened to be trespassing) that most of us find downright repulsive.
Monk parakeets, the talkative green and gray immigrants from South America, make for popular pets. Bird catchers raid nests, snatch babies and sell them to dealers for $20 each. (Down the line, retailers fetch up to $200 a bird.)
Over the last 40 years, so many of the pet birds have flown the coop that squawking flocks of monk parakeets have become as common in South Florida as traffic jams. They've overwhelmed expensive efforts by power companies to get rid of their communal nests -- bundles of wooden sticks, some as big as Volkswagens, the parakeets construct on trees and power poles. Electric companies complain that the nests wreak havoc.
POWERFUL PESTS
''They do millions of dollars in damage to power lines and transformers,'' said Bill Thomas Jr., a Florida-based invasive species strike team leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But programs to control certain invaders are subject to peculiar public sensitivities -- not of the scientific kind.
We just like monk parakeets. Maybe we don't feel so kindly toward FPL.
A 2005 eradication campaign in Connecticut by a local power company brought howls of protests and a lawsuit by animal lovers. Similar pro-parakeet protests have erupted in Vancouver, Chicago, New York, Texas and New Jersey.
Thomas figures it's a moot issue in Florida, where monk parakeets have proliferated beyond the point of no return. It would be as futile as going after iguanas. Instead, he's concentrating on ''winnable projects.'' And the nice thing about going after the giant Nile monitors savaging rookeries and devouring household pets in Southwest Florida is that, well, we don't love seven-foot-long voracious lizards like we love parakeets.
NO RAT LOVERS?
The effort to stanch an outbreak of Gambian pouch rats, another erstwhile pet gone wild on Grassy Key, hasn't inspired protests from rat lovers. No public resistence has arisen with his nearly desperate fight to keep the Burmese python from flourishing on Key Largo. (Trackers discovered the radio collar of an endangered wood rat in the belly of a python at Crocodile Lake). Snakes -- particularly large, scary, exotic snakes that have already created havoc among the wading birds in Everglades National Park -- don't inspire public affection.
But when state wildlife officers tried to get rid of the feral cats that were threatening birds and endangered wood rats in a Key Largo sanctuary, cat people went berserk.
Wildlife officials have been a little more reticent about programs aimed at the purple swamp hen and the sacred ibis in western Palm Beach County, though both exotics are displacing -- and sometimes eating -- native birds. They understand that we simply like some alien species more than others.
Just like the monk parakeet, for all its squawking, gets more love than an endangered native bird catcher.
