saskatoons and raspberries

saskatoons and raspberries, originally uploaded by Sophie_vf.

I was complaining to Liz, a fellow Flickr-er who lives in my area, that we almost never get any saskatoons and what little the bushes produce, the birds eat. This is the first year I have ever seen them in any abundance - I think partly due to the rain, partly due to a large hawk that has taken up residence in our green strip. I haven't seen the usual numbers of small birds that are resident here, normally clustering around our feeder, then moving on to the bushes.

Saskatoons are quite small at the best of times, but they're larger than usual this year, and actually look kind of juicy.

Because we're not used to looking for berries on this bush, there are quite a few that have started to dry out before we even noticed they were there. This is the beauty of these berries, for wildlife anyway - they dry out right on the bush, and stay there - they don't fall off and rot. So they're available for birds through the winter (assuming they haven't been consumed yet) and I imagine this must also have been useful for the First Nations people in this area as well.



They're small and a bit fussy to pick, and I'm not really planning on doing a lot with them - some people make jam, syrup or wine - but they're nice to snack on. Maybe they need to sit on a dollop of whipped cream, though.