American robins and cedar waxwings by the hundreds are feeding on wild fruits. Flocks of American goldfinches eat sycamore seeds, shredding the seedballs so the fragments blow in the wind, reminding me of cottonwood cotton in May. Goldfinches winter here, but the big robin flocks usually don't arrive until later. Mass entry now tells me that severe weather is coming. Today's hoards are such a contrast to the few individuals that stay all winter, singing lyrically on mild mornings. The crowd strips berry bushes clean in a day, drinks my birdbath dry in an hour, and churns the forest's leaf litter like a herd of armadillos.

Robin and cedar waxwing flocks may stay around for several days, joined or replaced by others over the next month or two. Mortality is terrific on streets, at windows, and in the ravine by house cats and boys with BB guns and air rifles. I've just asked two junior-high hunters to vacate our nature preserve, a conservation concept they don't appear to understand because parents and schools teach little or nothing about nature's values. Moreover, human males may have genes for hunting as females do for gathering, now called shopping -- both behaviors derived from our prehistoric heritage. Robins like chinaberries that have been frozen, thawed, and fermented, and they may get tipsy eating them. A clowning event is a flock of robins flapping to stay upright, falling to the ground, flying into trees, hanging upside down from twigs, all the time noisily quarreling over feeding space. Other berry choices, not so entertaining but colorful, are red possumhaws, blue junipers, orange sugarberries, black gum bumelias and Indian cherries, white western soapberries and Chinese tallows, and brown flameleaf and smooth sumacs. Chinaberries are largest, which may be the robin's cue to nutritional value, unless the birds are natural barflies.