The apple tree outside the kitchen window is a cloud of pale pink and white blossoms. Despite an early spring and subsequent frosts, there will be a bumper crop of apples this year. At least in my yard. But that isn’t the only thing I’m expecting to see a bumper crop of. Lately, a flock of grackles have decided that my back yard would make a great rookery. There’s a nest in the hollowed crook between two pine trees, another in a hollow branch in the apple tree, and still others in the large soft maple.
It brings to mind the nursery rhyme about four and twenty black birds baked in a pie. Grackles are black-ish birds and you’d need at four and twenty to stuff a nice size pie, though there would be so many bones, I don’t you’d have to be starving to make them into a pie.
Which, naturally, makes me think of Little House on the Prairie where Laura Ingalls Wilder writes about Ma cooking up some of the pesky birds after they’d destroyed the oat crop and were well on their way to eating up the corn. There were only twelve in that pie as I recall.
Interesting where the mind goes. From apples, to grackles, to pie, to famous children’s books... With this kind of concentration, it’s a wonder I get anything done.
RSS Feed
