Crockerytoo

Snapped today in the courtyard of a magnificent art deco house opposite Perth's Hyde Park was this Sulphur-crested cocky.

He seemed to be getting along well with the two resident tortoiseshell cats.

Mr Hyde

This ravenous creature has been immortalised in textile beside the Hyde Park lake, in London, Guv.

I stand corrected, but it looks suspiciously like a Scaly-breasted lorikeet (Trichoglossus chlorolepidotus) to me, which is a first for this blog.

Doubi, doubi, doubi, doo.

This cranky-looking thing is painted on the side of a bridge in Lyon, France.

The gift that keeps on giving

Just when you thought:

• France could not possibly offer up another dodgy parrot painting; nor
  
• another macaw; and
• that a return to pics of real parrots was just around the corner;

here's another sample of French macaw fetishism, pictured in a shopfront in Avignon.

Gee, I wonder what the first picture painted by the kid who buys the pencils will be??

... meaning the macaw cult of France will live on and on.

And that can't be a bad thing.

Parroting Peter Sellers

I think it was a macaw I saw in Peter Sellers' "The Party".

This happy blue thing in Lyon doesn't look much like a macaw though.

Macaw and order

In France, the macaw is the law.

Budgie smuggler

Also in the Musee d'Orsey was this exquisite Art Moderne rendering of a pair of budgies.

As the sign behind says, the two lime budgerigars are inseparable.

Made me want to pick the thing up, sneak out the front door, and become a budgie smuggler ;-)

Up close and ear-shriekingly personal

Here's a close-up of the surreal squawker mentioned below.

Surreally good parrot.

Proving that Surrealism does not have to be all about lobster-phones and graable, faable, definitaable, Spanish master Joan Miro throws in a touch of parrot (bottom off-centre).

The painting is called Collage, it was painted in 1929, and it's in the Musee d'Orsey.

Birds of a feather

Even back in 1785, when Marie-Antionette and her hubby ruled the roost at Versailles, a blue macaw was never too far away*.

I wonder if it spoke French?

* Photo by Hazel Blackberry

Karaoke parrot

As I said, the French love a parrot.

This little fella was snapped in Versailles, just down the road from the palace.

He was advertising Chez Cesar's extensive range of parrot burgers.

Cockatoo cocktail

Along the Cote d'Azur, in Nice to be precise, suave cocktail slurpers would not be caught dead without their parrot-bedecked cocktail cooler.

Kind of Blue

This introspective character was also created by Monseiur de Lajaue, on the same colourful paravent.

Parrot vent

This large-schnozzered creature was found perched on an ornate 18th century privacy screen that was part of the eclectic collection at the Petit Palace gallery in Paris.

A real looker, aint he?

Next time you're ambling by the Petit Palace, I suggest you drop in, sidle up to the nearest attendant and – in your finest French – ask to be pointed in the direction of Paravent, crafted in 1735 by parrot lover Jaques de LaJaue.

Oh, and tell 'em Grumpy sent ya.

Hekyll or Jekyll?

Perhaps no nation celebrates its parrots in art quite so much as Australia.

Though that's a big "perhaps".

In Perth, for instance, you'll see all manner of cockatoos and cockatiels adorning bus shelters and the sides of butcher shops - even frozen, like this one, in bronze surveying a chess board in Hyde Park.

Rupert Macawl

... nor on the external walls of Northbridge grog halls.

A trip to the moon on Besser brick wings

Parrots have been a bit thin on the ground, and in the sky, of late - but not on the side of the dunny block at Bruce Lee Oval in Beaconsfield ...

They call me yellow fellow

Found perched above the footpath, these chirpwhistles gave Hazel and me a spritely welcome to Goomalling this morning.

I believe they're Regent Parrots, of the Westralis race. Not that I saw any real ones.

Holding parrot

This fella dangles from the ceiling of Hazel's and my shed.

He used to guard the weedy Wisteria on our balcony in Canberra from marauding sulphur crests, but now we're in Western Australia he lives more sedately.

If you pull the string under his gut, his wings flap. Seeing as there's not too many sulphur crests around here, and he now lives under a roof, his string only gets pulled every now and then by hand out of love, rather than hourly by beak for torment.

Picture by Hazelblackberry

I'm being followed by a Woo shadow.

So grief-stricken were we when Woo flew off this mortal coil that we see him everywhere we go: lurking in shadows, flitting through parklands, etched into mist-marks on shower screens ...
(photo by Hazel Blackberry)