P.S. If you remove the asparagus, I urge you to replace it with a thicket of some sort.

Should read:
P.S. HASBEEN, if you remove the asparagus, I urge you to replace it with a thicket of some sort

Luddy, I am starting to doubt your story of living in Townsville. That or you are a very very heavy sleeper.

You say birds will START taking heavy objects up high to drop on roofs & people.

When I lived in Townsville, 50 years ago, at this time of year we would get half a dozen such droppings of large heavy green mangoes, on the roof each night.

I learnt to sleep through it, but my mother never did. Moving back south was a return to civilisation for her.

I believe that " half a dozen such droppings of large heavy green mangoes" was Du Maurier's alternative plot for the demise of Rebecca...but she decided to stick with her original synopsis.

(How does that sound, WmTrevor?)

the best you got is mangoes?
lets dig deeper

Aeschylus was killed in 456 BC when an eagle (or more likely a Lammergeier), mistaking the playwright's bald crown..for a stone, dropped a tortoise on his head (though some accounts differ, claiming it was a stone dropped by an eagle or vulture that likely mistook his bald head for the egg of a flightless bird).

The inscription on his gravestone
was written by himself before his death..it talks only of his war mongering..;oh well so much for signs
http://www.crystalinks.com/aeschylus.html

i recall hithcocks 'the birds'..that today is renowned for its poor special affects..but heck lets spin it anyhow

"Heavy green mangoes" sounds more like an Australian rewrite of a Kathy Bates/Jessica Tandy film, Poirot.

But I've been reclining à la Ramon Novarro in my slum coloured poking jacket as the muse-de-jour (day nurse) tickles my fancy...

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and duct;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of luck -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of pluck
Meant in croaking "'aarrk, 'aarrk, 'aarrk!"

"...plum coloured smoking jacket..." I blame Titivillus or Spooner.