Residents of Sheffield, England have been perturbed by a bizarre phenomenon: someone has been stapling slices of bread to trees.
The stapling appears to be occurring at night when, under the cover of darkness, the mystery person has been stalking the city streets, and selecting trees at random to be, um, sliced? Breaded? Who knows? All we know for sure is that it's happening.
This bizarre act is far from an isolated incident, and appears to be a part of a craze sweeping the internet.
A local resident said: "There is a curious development in Brincliffe Gardens.
"This week the trees on the north side of the road have been 'decorated' by persons unknown with slices of white bread which have been stapled in place.
They are on the north side of the road and on the north east sides of the trees. Is this part of some weird new cult?"
The phenomenon originates from Reddit, where people have been sharing pictures, which, surprise surprise, are captioned: "Bread Stapled To Trees".
But hey! This is a lot less dangerous than the Tide Pod Challenge, and it's keeping the local birds with a constant supply of free bread, so you keep doing you, mystery bread stapler.
To put the popularity of the stapling phenomenon into context, the subreddit has 211,000 members.
People have been getting creative about where they are stapling their loaves too, alternating between stapling them to the body of trees to smaller branches, and of course, varying things up by using the ends of loaves too.
So, on that note, happy slicing / breading!
But, a word of warning to whoever is stapling bread to trees in Sheffield: if you do it to trees on private property, you could be putting yourself at risk of criminal prosecution, and no one, least of all the local birds, want that!
