What's New Around The Farm

The pace of life has increased as the snow has melted. The chickens, locked up for a week to keep them safe from our marauding fox, are once again free to roam during the day. I round them up about dinnertime and herd them back indoors for the night. As for the fox, I presume that something or someone killed it because it has disappeared:

As the ground thawed and the spring rains began, I used the tractor bucket to reopen the trench in which water drains away from the barn:

The drainage trench runs from the barn to the dirt road:

My thirteen bantam hens were laying so many eggs that I was feeding them to the dogs. Alas, both Seamus and Jack (especially Jack!) were rapidly gaining weight. This pan of 27 eggs was their last breakfast of scrambled eggs. Since then, I've been giving the eggs to the family across the road who plows my snow in the wintertime:

The fantail pigeons have bill billing and cooing in a most charming way, but now that the weather is warm enough to raise babies, they aren't:

The hens check every inch of ground for possible edibles and tractor tire tracks are a good place to look for earthworms:

And bugs might be hiding along the base of the barn:

Every morning I open their door and watch them all scramble down their ramp, excited to begin their adventurous day:

Both the house and barn have filled with flies. The flies (and ladybugs) in the house seem to die as soon as they emerge, but the flies in the barn are alive and active, crawling all over the windowpanes:

The neighbors were actively sugaring this spring. They seem to be all done now, though the lines are still up:

I open the pigeons' window on nice days, but they have not been going outside. This one bird got as far as the windowsill for a look around - and that's about it. I guess they figure they're warm, safe and fed indoors, so why invite trouble?:

A lawn full of chickens. There are rotten apples all over the ground there, but the chickens don't seem to be eating them: