It's spring time! And while it is always thrilling to see green and flowers after a long, dreary winter, the animal life is just as (or more) exciting.
So far this season, I have stumbled across frogs, a long-tailed salamander, large snails, a young rat snake, and a mama mouse with her four babies still latched on while she tried to run and hide from me.
Friday, a friend of mine nearly stepped on a little box turtle as we walked through some woods. I scooped her up, took her home, and named her Happy. She is currently living in a large watering trough I used last year as a planter. She likes to burrow in the soft dirt beneath the leaves of the plantain and other weeds. She's so good at hiding, the kids keep thinking she has escaped.
In other news, I have an incubator in the laundry room warming 15 eggs that are scheduled to hatch while some friends of ours are here for a visit. I am most anxious to see what pops out of the two off-white eggs in there. Those eggs were laid by Lizzy-Chick, the half-Polish daughter of our beloved Lizzy that we lost last year. We had Lizzy-Chick penned in with Fluffy-Head, Zivah's little silkie rooster. I wasn't sure at first if the eggs would be fertilized as Lizzy-Chick seemed to have thwarted every advance of Fluffy-Head's that I had seen. But he must have gotten his way at least a few times. When I candled the eggs the other day, both had evidence of an embryo and blood vessels growing inside.
And it appears that the incubator chicks won't be the only chicks born on the farm this year. One of the hens has started sitting on a clutch of eggs. I went to offer her some scratch yesterday, and she about pecked my fingertip off, so beware. That mama's serious.
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