The brown, brown farm...

...but it's getting greener every day!

I figured you'd all had enough chicken action this week, so here are some photos from a walk I took around the farm last week.

(Speaking of chicken action, one of the hens raped another hen on the weekend... although given that the "victim" started preening immediately afterwards, perhaps it was more consensual than I initially thought!)

Pileated woodpecker holes at the base of a tree in our woodlot.

Mossy green and a little snow!


And this is very peculiar...

It's in our woodlot, and appears to be over the stump of a long-gone tree, but it's more like some kind of midden that SOMETHING has been living in, judging by the entry holes!

The top is covered in bits of pinecone! Any idea what's living in this thing?


Speaking of which, there are lots of holes like this drilled in the ground:

Meadow voles, perhaps.

And this is our creek, aka the municipal drain:

Approximately every 25 years, they take a backhoe to it and clean it out, totally destroying the wildlife habitat and making it look like a moonscape. There's nothing we can do about it, as the farmers want it cleaned out to improve field drainage, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I hope things grow back quickly!

Here's how it looked last spring, before the clean-out:

To make it worse, just before the township decided to bring in the backhoe, the local stewardship council had planted hundreds of sumac, dogwood and other seedlings along the banks, to stop erosion. The backhoe took out about half of those. None of us were pleased, to say the least. Out of our hands.


Meanwhile, back to reality. Here's the brown, brown farm:

But things have greened up a lot even since I took these photos!


Last week there was still a little snow in the woodlot, but it's all gone now.

The pond is thawed out the and spring peepers are singing their nightly frogging chorus:

And Sophie and Tristan take a bracing dip every day!

Happy spring!