Invasion of the tree berry snatcher

I have this beautiful evergreen pine of some sort that sits to the East of my house directly outside my living room windows. When I awoke today to find it covered in snow from last nights 3 more additional inches I smiled. It made me think of the flocking my grandmother used to put on our Christmas tree’s when I was a child to make the tree appear as if it had snow on it during the Christmas holiday.

Sitting at my desk I read through some emails when an exceptionally large flock of birds over took my winter dwelling sparrows tree. Sweeping hundreds of them out of the sky into my poor tree to pick of the green little berry looking things from my evergreen.

They’d get spooked at something and all take off simutaneously making this very eerie wooomphwish sound. They were neat looking birds, probably 2.5 times the size of my little wintering sparrows. They had black breasts with white spots, brown (same color brown as my sparrows) heads and winds but the wings had this faint yellow color creating a pattern of spot type stripes. The yellow was not obvious until you really watched one not moving for awhile, otherwise it looked to just be a patterened brown head and wings. The tail did include white black and brown, and the beaks were slightly straight like needle nose pliers, but not very long as if they were wood peckers. They used this beaks to break INTO the little green berry like things to eat them I think, they fluttered alot while eating and were very skittish birds, more so than my sparrows who live in the tree.

They have come invaded my tree and left. There is still some green berry like things on the tree so I am not worried for my sparrows to starve the winter through, but they were here, caused a disturbance in my tree and its year long residents, caused a twittering uproar, then swooped away in one sudden sound and left, leaving my poor cat mauing loudly at the loss of his entertainment.

Now if I only knew what kind of migratory bird this was…..