Cue the "Polly wanna cracker?" jokes.
C'mon Eupher: you know that the birds were the masterminds of the whole operation. Natural thieves, the lot of 'em.
When I was a little kid, my mom took me to Burney Falls in the Redwoods National Forest. While we sat on the rock wall keeping folks out of the stream proper, my mom was giving 'Nila wafers to the local squirrels. The squirrels would take the cookie and run it up to their cache in thhe trees they were nesting in, then come down for another. What they neglected to notice was that a blue jay was watching where they deposited the cookies, and as soon as they were headed back for another one, the bird would swoop in and steal it, My mom must have given 4 - 5 tree rats 4 - 5 cookies apiece before the one blue jay had had his fill and moved on.