Flowering cherries are lovely but, like all flowering trees, their blooms seem so short-lived.
So imagine my dismay when I saw fully opened blooms on the ground under the tree the same day that the flowers started to open. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I hadn’t remembered that from prior years.
The answer was revealed the following day when I came home from walking the dog. I found a pair of finches systematically plucking off the blooms. They would pluck, hold the bloom in their beaks for a brief moment, and then discard it.
As I started to notice, I found a pair of house sparrows doing the same things to the new shoots of my Japanese maple. And squirrels do this to my sugar maples, but they do it with larger bits, breaking off small twigs.
It’s only the loss of the flowers I regret, though. You can see why below.
Gardendaze 