Citrus

I went on a short field trip to an atrium on the campus where I work. I used to hang out there occasionally as an undergrad -- they used to have a koi pond, and the atrium was a lovely warm green space to walk through in the middle of winter. Eventually, stupid people decided that the atrium would be a good place to release budgies and other small birds. I don't know if this was planned by the administration or whether people just started dumping their pets there. The result, though, was that every time you walked through the atrium you risked being pooped on by the increasing bird population.

I hadn't been back there in a few years, but when I visited the atrium a few weeks ago, it hadn't gotten any better -- in fact, it seemed worse than before. The entire west side is covered in droppings and feathers. I walked along the east side to the south side, where I discovered a citrus tree of some kind. They don't grow here, so I stopped for a few minutes to draw the fruit:



The fruit is quite large. It's probably a grapefruit tree. A particularly lumpy citrus was lying on the ground:



I managed to make it out of there without any birds relieving themselves on me. I miss the way the atrium used to be, and it's too sad to visit it now and wonder why no one seems to want to reclaim it and make it a nice place again.