The snow and ice are melting (no more icy path to the barnyard, yea!!), we're experiencing heatwave temperatures (I know it's only 40, but 40 compared to -15 . . .), and the birds are singing. Compared to when you go outside on a really cold January morning, and only rarely is the quiet broken by stray bird song. Today there's all kinds of chirping, squawking, and noises going on. Partially attributed to the fact that the robins are back. I thought they had left because they'd cleaned us out of hackberries a couple of weeks ago. I was wrong on two fronts . . .
I don't think they completely left, based on their current numbers:
And they didn't clean us out of hackberries . . . they just knocked most of them on the ground, and then it snowed.
When I knelt down to take some of these photos I found that the robins seemed to start to think I was a big blue rock that suddenly appeared, or that at least if I was human I wasn't moving enough to cause problems. So they started to land close and eat hackberries:
Eventually I had to quit being a big blue rock, and headed back to the house, when I observed this pile near the northwest corner of our west porch.
Which at first had me thinking that a deer had been awfully close to our house, which is pretty unusual. But then I looked closer . . . these were to spherical and purple to be deer pellets. No, a little critter had cached hackberries under the snow; well now their cache isn't hidden anymore. Probably a mouse or other rodent. Doubt it was a squirrel . . . our last resident squirrel got hit on the road last year.
Enough naturalist wonderings . . . time to get some buckets washed and tap a couple of trees. Anxious to see if the sap will run this week.
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