Sap is drip, drip, dripping into our drive by adverstisements for Big R (they don't sell plain buckets of course, and yes we know that the old timers used metal, which is way cooler). So far we have about 3 gallons collected since Tuesday. This is what the dripping looks like up close. The trees were running sap the day I tapped them.
Otherwise, the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, almost all of the snow is melted, except for places like the compost pile where there were gigantic drifts. I wouldn't doubt those would be gone by the end of the day though. The birds are all out foraging the pasture or the yard as they see fit.
Here's Ginny and Essie sporting their hen aprons (that I was sewing on a couple of weeks ago; I said I would show them modeling them):
Hopefully they work, I don't really like playing veterinarian to turkey wounds. Their skin is like tissue paper under all those feathers, and it's just not pretty. We seem to be able to mark our calendars by Thomas the turkey . . . he takes Valentine's Day pretty seriously, and will almost have always started "courting" his hens by then. I'll leave it at that . . . turkey courtship is a lot of fanning of feathers, posturing, clucking, and general goofiness. Turkeys are the barnyard flirters if there is a such a thing.
We have a new addition to our barnyard, Runt the pig. I have yet to photograph him . . . but will sometime in the near future to share with you. For now, know that he is small, and mostly scared of people. But he's getting to be not so shy around me, as he's learning that I feed him the good stuff, i.e. leftovers from the fridge. We hope to bolster him up from his runt size and status to the roly, poly pig he should be now that he doesn't have to battle anybody bigger than him for food and water. We'll see how that goes.
Nature wise, I discovered that we've been having a creature of the night frequent one of our maple trees. We haven't hear their noises, but I discovered evidence of them on the ground:
That would be a pellet (the hairball with bones looking thing in the middle of the picture) from our neighborhood owl. There were a whole bunch of these on the ground; I took a picture of the least gross one. Maybe it sleeps in our tree or just like to sit and hack up pellets there. I don't know . . . not an expert on owl habits. Just know that we have one around.
Happy weekending. Looking for a good sap run around here.
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