Rain drop on shadberry: Yay It Finally Rained
Listen, I appreciate your company. When you are actually enjoying the fruit of our Amelanchier alnifolia, posing jauntily with one pale ripening berry in your mouth and quirking your long tail, you are rather fetching in an Audobonesque type of way.
But I have a problem with your habit of bullying the other birds, making a great fuss and noise when they approach the tree, alarming and driving off the finches and such like, and generally appearing to try to appropriate the entire berry-filled tree to yourself.
I would bring it to your attention that you are, at best, six inches in height, sitting atop a tree that is at least ten feet high and contains several hundred berries. You have no pockets, and your entire methodology for berry transport is limited to flying away with a single berry in your beak.
I get it that you are not a very public-spirited species. Your willful appropriation of the best bits out of other birds' songs, in defiance of international intellectual property standards, is notorious.
You may also argue that you are, in fact, not actually harming any other birds, and if the timorous little song birds flutter away at your feints and noise despite the lack of any real danger, that this is a flaw in their genetic strategy and not your problem.
Aggressive mockingbird in my shadberry tree, this is disingenuous. Given the impossibility of eating, storing, or otherwise benefiting from your reckless attempt to hoard the entire berry stock, I appeal to you to take up a more-forward looking and community-spirited view.
Or, if self-interest is the only grounds from which you operate, you should note that I will remember the behavior of June come the chilly months of bird-feeder season. So, shape up, buster.
