Drunken Birds

Deja Pseu's comment yesterday made me think of this. In the interior of Alaska, up Fairbanks way, there are lots of berries, but no indigenous fruit trees, and only two fruit trees which, having been imported, will put out fruit. The crab apple and the chokecherry. Just the sound of those puckers my lips -- no thought of eating the fruit of those trees just as it comes from the tree would ever cross anyone's mind.

At Antler Manor, we had a lovely chokecherry tree in the back yard. The robins came through on their way south in the fall and stripped the fruit.

Except the year that we had the early freeze, when they flew over Fairbanks without their usual layover, and the chokecherries stayed on the tree all winter long. And fermented.

And in the spring, when everything thawed out and the robins returned, we had flocks of drunken robins in our yard. Flying into things. Laying on the ground and letting us pick them up. Absolutely out of it.

In A Nutshell follows.