Lamenting lost apricots

We have a little bench under an apricot tree at the back of our garden. Once there were 3 large branches hanging over the place where the bench is but one of them caught your hair every time you tried to sit down and it got pruned back quite a lot. Then the second branch got damaged while the fence was being put up and eventually it died leaving only one productive branch over our side of the fence. Last night, the weight of the apricots in the wind caused that last branch to snap off. (sob sob)Usually picking apricots is a bit like that game they used to have on one of the radio stations called "beat the bomb". They would think of a dollar amount as the maximum prize money. It could be as little as $20 or something like $3,000. You could ring up to play the game and they would start calling out dollar amounts getting higher and higher until you said "stop". You would then win that amount of money. However, if the amount they called out got above the maximum, a bomb sound would go off and you would get nothing. The more greedy you were, the more money you could win but the higher your chances of getting nothing at all. Our apricots are like that because you want to leave them on the tree as long as possible to let them ripen. Just when you think it's ALMOST time to pick them, the Rosellas come and eat the whole lot. In the morning when you go to work, there is a tree full of apricots but when you got home that night, there is not one left on the whole tree. I have tried several types of bird net over the tree but was never successful in keeping them out. One year, I even trapped a bird inside the netting for a few hours! At least this year I was forced to say "stop" and got some apricots, even if I have lost our last branch. A small consolation!