Ornaments fly off the trees

LAKESIDE, Ore. – When ornaments from two Christmas trees in front of Lakeside City Hall began disappearing earlier this month, Sheli Roe and Ted Ross were upset.

There must be some local grinches in the city, they thought.

Maybe someone really needed some gifts for their kids.

“It’s sad, is what you’re thinking. It’s Christmas and someone would steal Christmas ornaments?” said Roe, a two-year resident of Lakeside.

Roe helped Ross, the fire chief of the Lakeside Rural Protection District, decorate one of the six trees traditionally donated by Mountain View Farms each year. She made many of the firefighting-themed ornaments herself. Other volunteers decked out a tree for the senior center hung with recycled prescription pill bottles. They decorated trees for the Parks and Community Garden Club, the Lakeside Chamber of Commerce and the Salmon Trout Enhancement Partnership.

Then ornaments disappeared one by one.

From the fire tree, toy cars disappeared. Then foam badges and tiny red fire hydrants. Ornaments vanished off the senior tree.

Ross began sleuthing.

Up the road from City Hall, he found a pill bottle. Later, he came across a toy motorcycle that once adorned the fire district’s tree.

The next evening, he found some unlikely suspects.

No one expected the culprits to be short, black and feathery. But Ross saw them. It was a murder of crows.

“All I could see was something bright red in the crows’ feet as they were flying off,” Ross said. It seems during the recent cold spell, the birds were hungry. Ross guessed the crows thought the bright, sparkling ornaments might be tasty.

“A crow is an animal of opportunity. If it sees something it thinks it can eat, it will check it out,” the fire chief said.

Ross and Roe found the situation pretty funny.

“One thing it did do is restore my faith that the kids in Lakeside enjoy the trees as much as we do,” he said.

Roe said it made her day OK knowing it was crows, especially after dozens of hours spent making the decorations. She said she recalled a crow stealing a bright orange egg during this year’s Easter egg hunt but didn’t originally put the two cases together.

“It never occurred to us that the crows would take little metal cars,” Roe said.

After learning the news, Roe quickly made new ornaments and replenished the tree. This time, though, she tied them on as tightly as she could.

“They’re going to have to take the whole tree to get them,” Roe said.