By the time this paper was slogged off at your mailbox, the calendar equinox dated as the first day of spring will have already passed.
Spring will have sprung or so be it hoped for, time will tell.
Perhaps it is age related, but I am really looking forward to the arrival of spring this year. I’m getting a little tired of walking wide and short-stepping it across our slippery, ice-covered driveway.
I am also getting a little weary of slogging knee-deep in drifting snow to check on my birds three times daily. But I must admit, it is my little piece of heaven on earth when I get there. Nothing can be more pleasant than a song of a bird during the doldrums of winter.
I also must admit that I have not paid as much attention as I should have to my wild bird feeder. I have only one pair of cardinals, a half-dozen chickadees, both white-breasted and black-breasted nuthatch, and strange as it may seem, only one blue jay.
The flock of about 60 snowbirds has not shown up this year to sit as they have in years past on the roof of my birdie bungalow, and the flock of wild turkeys, due, I suspect, to the presence of coyotes in the area, have not strutted across our back 40.
But I have seen crows, ravens and mourning doves fly up from our distant manure pile – feasting, I figure, on the grains dropped by our feeding animal.
On the other hand, on a quick sunny day trip down to Fergus to pick up my special canary seed mix at Sharpe’s, we saw a flock of snowbirds, which I guesstimated to be nearing 1,000, fly up from one of the snow-covered, untilled stubble fields.
On the same trip, a short stop at a farm where a licensed bird bander had set up his mist-nets by a feeder, dozens of the little red-poles were being banded and released. In addition, on the trip back home, along beside a large cattle feedlot, we counted not less than 80 contented wild turkeys filling their crops to carry them through the cold winter night. I strongly suspect that the feedlot owner has been flinging an abundance of corn out there for them.
In the meantime folks, my incubator has just hatched a bundle of baby chicks of six different breeds of show bantams, and the next batch is due to enter the world just ten days later.
And all during this time I have canaries feeding their babies in eight different nests. I have not counted them yet, but I see three and four little heads on wobbly necks popping up in three or four of them. And in the barn we have some baby Boer goats due to arrive next week.
I have lots of exciting moments ahead of me.
Meanwhile, a snicker or two just snagged from my chuckle bucket read exactly like this: Sign on a veterinarian’s waiting room: “Be back in five minutes. Sit! Stay!”; and at an optometrist’s office: “If you don’t see what you are looking for, you’ve come to the right place.”
Take care, ‘cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105