Abundant sour cherries

We've never lived anywhere conducive to growing cherries, although I've certainly enjoyed Bing cherries from the Pacific Northwest, as well as occasional sour cherry products of varying sorts.

So it was with some amazement that we've watched the two large cherry trees develop fruits and slowly ripen.  A visitor (from Florida) said one was a Rainier because of its appearance, but the taste of ripening fruits didn't seem like Rainier, nor were they the right size.  They are now turning completely red.

Fruits from one of the trees are really quite tasty, the other tree's fruits are still sour.  As sweet cherries aren't supposed to be hardy here, I'm imagining that these are sour cherries that happen to be good for fresh eating, too, if you don't expect them to taste like Bings!

These two trees are large, requiring a ladder to pick most of the fruits.  There are way too many to harvest completely, in any case, in the time I have before we leave.  I'm not sure what I'd do with all of them, aside from drying or freezing, and I don't yet have a dehydrator or a cherry pitter (I'm not sure about the paper clip/straw/ice pick alternative methods...)  Apparently, you can also just freeze them whole. As we do have an empty chest freezer in the basement, maybe that's the ticket.

The birds so far in the garden don't seem interested yet, but we're surrounded by a lot of pastures and fields, so perhaps many of the fruit-eating birds haven't made their way here yet!  There are abundant robins in the national park, but we haven't seen them in our garden here.