Survival of the Fattest
Me and the robins are picking pie cherries this week. All of us think the cherry trees belong to us, but … my thinking is I planted them so maybe I have more rights than the birds. Course, there’s no cherry court to adjudicate our claims so we are left with what all of us South Enders have for justice, Law of the Jungle. For the most part we all get a fair share. The deer and I split the apples. The raccoons and I divide up the corn. This wasn’t as true for the sweet cherries. The crows and the robins took most of them, leaving me sputtering with rage and revenge.
One year I found a recently dead crow and walked it around the orchard. Within minutes I had a dozen or more live relatives of the deceased cawing and screaming from every tree in the vicinity so I made a couple of circles just to make my point, then tied the dead boy in the branches of my favorite cherry tree trussed up wing to wing, a very dark and ominous corpse that the crows and the mizzus found more than a little troubling. Trust me, they left the cherries to the guy who was now their sworn enemy, but there are only so many dead crows you can scrounge up every harvest time and only so much marital criticism you can withstand so eventually they all outnumbered me.
I planted new cherry trees the last couple of years, the kind that don’t turn red, just a nice yellow so the birdbrains don’t think they’re ripe until I’ve picked them. We may find out the birdbrain is the one who wears the hat, but I’m willing to give this a shot. Admittedly I’m not too optimistic.
We had a grove of filbert trees awhile back, thousands of nuts on a few dozen trees. The jays and the squirrels took every one. Occasionally they’d leave me a solitary nut on the ground, I guess as a peace offering, but 100% of the time the nut was empty. They knew it was empty. All the 25 years we had those filberts we never got one single nut. This, I would argue in tree court, is unadulterated greed, pure and simple and unconscionable. Worse, the blue jays would sit in the branches and scream at us if we came near their trees. They are a beautiful shade of blue, but the screech of a jay isn’t something you can tolerate for long. No more than ten seconds in my case.
Like I say, I’m willing to share. Squirrels and blue jays, not so much. They’re like the rich, enough is not a word they understand. They want more, they want way more, they want yours too, they want it all. The poor? Tough luck. Grow wings and fly up to the top branches where the goodies are. If not, shut up and go home, Loser. If you even got a home….
The 1% might want to listen to the next part of this story. Us losers get fed up eventually. I took my chainsaw out to the filbert grove one autumn after another season of nut-grubbing greed and one by one I took down those nut trees, every single one of them. They were shading the garden and blocking my view of the Puget Sound anyway so it wasn’t a hard decision and now I’ve planted cherry and plum trees instead. Whatever predator comes in to supplant the jays, I can only hope they plan to share. Living in harmony with nature down on the wild wild South End isn’t the easiest thing to do. Right now they’re just lucky I’m not a hunter. But I wouldn’t count on it staying that way.
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