Winter Prolonged, Spring Arriving

Many warmer days allow me to open the pigeons' window - with a screen in it, of course:

 They keep nesting and laying eggs, then abandoning them when they don't hatch. I wonder how they know when the time is up:

 But they seem happy and healthy:

 And they keep trying:

 The little hens seldom go broody, but they are laying a few eggs. Of course they cannot hatch because there is no rooster, but the hens don't know that. The broodiness has mostly been bred out of them so they'll lay more eggs (hens stop laying once their nest is full):

 These are the seven Barred Rock bantams. They're getting a little old now, but you'd never know it to look at them:

 The Easter Egger bantams (the brown ones) lay colored eggs and are younger:

I kept finding tracks in the snow but they were never clear enough to tell for sure if they were fox or cat. Furthermore, the online guides vary so widely that they weren't much help. I settled on this one as the clearest example: 

 Blue and Remy's pet Cottontail in the barn seems to have disappeared, but there are more bunnies outside, as indicated by their tracks. The tracks next to them could have been cat or fox, so I went in search of one that was clearer:

 This was the best example I could find. I decided it was a cat track:

Our prolonged winter weather gave me the blues, so I went back to my favorite online rose nursery and ordered two more Zone 3 hardy, continuous bloom roses added to my existing order of three other varieties. High Country Roses is a wonderful company with healthy plants, friendly service and over 300 varieties of own-root (not grafted) roses for all zones. You can check them out here: