Sprung

Here on the farm, spring has arrived in full force. The fields are green again, the trees are budding out, and there's a certain energy in the air. Of course, it's been an uncommonly sweet April so far, making everything seem a little rosier, with warm, fair days far outnumbering the rainy and drab. And, shaking off the winter, we've jumped into the new season with no looking back.

The pigs were the first to get an upgrade, getting moved out into the hickory grove, onto pasture. With a solar charger and some step-in plastic fence poles, setting up an enclosure for the swine was a simple afternoon's work; moving them to it was another story. The first attempt was a disaster, when the pigs refused to cross the concrete bridge spanning the creek. A few days later, in a jerry-rigged trailer clabbered together from a flatbed and a dog kennel, we finally wrangled the hogs (who each are topping 200 lbs. now) over into their new homes. They took to the new space with ease and aplomb, rooting for fallen hickory nuts as if nothing had changed. They're out there now, happy and content, turning up the swampy ground and working to restore what would otherwise be wasted space.

The chickens got a new upgrade in real estate too. They've been growing like weeds, and were well on their way to outgrowing the barn stall they'd been living in. After building two secondary frames of 2x4s and chicken wire to cover the doors at either end, the bay that housed the steers for the winter proved to be a perfect space. The birds now have room to spread out, stretch their wings, and get ready for their eventual lives in the great wide world.

The steers got a new address as well, moving out onto the fresh green pasture behind the house. This is my first real experiment in rotational grazing: the cattle get a few days to eat a section down before being moved on the new grass. Right now, after devouring their first area in a few scant days, they're on section two. In a week or two, they'll have mowed the entire region down, pasture by pasture, and then the fun of trying to get them across the bridge begins.

There have been several new additions to the farm as well. Earlier this week we picked up a small dexter steer named, originally, Dexter. Dexters are a small breed, and Dex is always going to be a slight fellow. He's leggy and fit, sporting a pair of odd conical devil horns; an interesting looking guy overall. He's become fast friends with #1, and relaxed into the eternal spring-time bliss of eating and sleeping.

New pigs have arrived too, ten of them, just pink and spotted mutts, but cute none-the-less. They are smaller than the Tams were when they came, but are bolder, learning the fence in a matter of hours. They have a bit of a mean streak, at least with each other, but they're mellowing as they get used to their new freedom.

Most recent of all, the farm acquired a rooster, a stately Americauna by the name of George. He's a stunning and pleasant bird, and his crow could come straight off a movie soundtrack, so typically rooster-ish is it. Luckily, you can't hear him from the house. The neighbors across the road might not be so lucky...

Hope is the Thing With Feathers

After my stint last week as Debbie Downer, I must say the weather for the last six days has made me thoroughly eat my words. I woke up tuesday to find a clear, warm sky above, and day by day since, the temperatures have crept up into the high sixties and, scarcely believable though it is, the low seventies. Yesterday was without doubt the finest day of this young year so far, and though rain and cloud-cover stand on the horizon, this week has been enough of a shot in the arm to see me through.

Oddly, one of the clearest signs of spring, symbolic of the coming seasons of plenty, have been an abundance of birds, of all sorts. Birds, for me, have always been something of an afterthought: the charisma and kinship of mammals have always drawn more of my attention. Yet increasingly, birds have turned from being the mere background noise of the animal world into the miraculous things they are. When was the lost time you stopped and thought about what it actually means to fly? Yeah, me neither.

If I'm speaking of birds, first perhaps I should talk about the chickens, who are doing quite well.

They are now just three weeks old, but already are growing at a rate that is hard to believe, doubling in size at least. I've given them the entire stall as their brooder room, and they've made good use of the space, trying out their fledgling wings in hopping, awkward flight. The birds have begun to molt, and like teenagers, they look rangy and thin, with long necks and oversize feet. Also like teenagers, they eat quantities of food that would put the pigs to shame. They chirp and preen and make short little bursts of running that always seem to take them right into one of their brooder-mates, bouncing off each other like little feathered projectiles. They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and go right back to eating.

Outside the barn, the chickens' wild relatives have also turned up in greater numbers. The bluebirds seemed to be the first, darting about the pasture weeks ago. Starlings, obnoxious though they may be, were next, and then the chickadees, who have been here all along, made their presence known with constant calling in the trees by the house. A redwing blackbird came soaring over-head today, mourning doves fly to the newly filled bird-feeder in pairs, and robins have begun to skip about the yard in droves.

Other birds, less obvious, make their presence known as well, for good or bad. A cock pheasant, solitary holdover of the hunting season, managed to dodge a winter's worth of coyotes and hawks, and he came strutting down by the bridge and along the creek yesterday in all his iridescent finery as if the farm belonged to him. A duck was not so lucky. I found its remains in the high field yesterday morning while walking the dog, and though it was newly killed, there was little left to judge just what the bird had been. White feathers with large, hollow quills, a deep breastbone; one of the domestic ducks from a local farm must have been carried off in the night. Even more mysterious, I found an owl pellet today, an even slighter clue. What species the owl was, I've no idea. I've never heard one here and certainly never seen one, but there was the evidence none the less, filled with the tiny bones of the mice and voles who new the owl in a more intimate, more terrible way.

Other birds have spring in their veins as well. At least one woodcock has begun to nest in the scrub thicket in the center of the main field, getting up with a twitter and circling around every time the dog and I approach. Killdeer wheel and call back and forth together all day. At first there were three of them, but now only two seem to be around, a male and female, ready to nest when the grass gets taller.

Most amazingly, I happened to catch the red tails mating the other day. I was walking from my car to the barn and nearly missed it; one hawk alighted in a hickory tree beside the stream, nothing special here where the hawks make their home. But as I watched, the second hawk, the male, ghosted down to land with the first hawk, and in a rustle of feathers that was brief and without ceremony, they coupled, and then flew off to separate trees. Hmmm. Maybe they're on the something...

Everywhere, the farm is coming alive again. Green is slowly seeping back into the fields, almost unnoticeably, and the snow is gone from even the deepest gullies. The bees are coming and going from their hive once more, and along the roadsides daffodils are sprouting from the earth. And the birds, over-head and all around, are taking this opportunity to flaunt their disregard for the dull pull of the earth. The hunters, the lovers, the prey, and the survivors; they all take wing together under the same spring sun.

The Season of Our Discontent

This morning, around eleven, a fox ran through the yard. I was walking to my car through the drizzling rain, and the fox darted up from below the barn. It hugged the barn wall, and shot over the road, while I stood watching. Across the road, the fox stopped, turning in the neighbors yard to look back at me. We locked eyes for a moment, but the wind was biting and the rain was cold. We both were quickly on our way.

The last few days have been those of quiet misery here on the farm. It isn't misery of any extravagant sort, just the spoiling misery of early spring discontentment. After a week of unseasonable warmth, the weather shifted last friday, and the oppression of gray and rainy days settled in.

These last weeks, leading up to the returning green, are proving to be the hardest, like the last few yards of a race (or so I would imagine). The barn yard has been tromped into a muddy ruin by the animals, after having at least been dry and walkable last week. Worse still is the pig run; the pigs, bigger now by far than when they first moved into the space, have been in their pen too long. They've torn the ground apart with their rooting, till the whole run looks like a World War I battlefield. They need to be moved to new pasture as soon as possible, but until the ground totally thaws and we stop getting nightly freezes, they're left to trash their current home.

Yet worst of all are the constant hints of spring. The clocks jumped ahead this weekend, but the extra hour of thin gray sunlight is barely distinguishable from all the other hours of thin gray sunlight. Bluebirds are back already, and a pair of plovers have moved into the pasture behind the barn, calling to each other with tinny hawkish cries. Even the chicks, after their rough first week, have grown swiftly and begun to fledge out. Soon, they too will need to move into new quarters.

Mostly, it was the nearly solid week of temperatures in the high fifties that has made this new weather so unpleasant. In that week, I walked the dog daily out in the fields, planning and measuring and thinking about what comes next. I got out and began to shift stones for the walls and even cut back the brush, and there was even sun to do it under. Now, the dog and I are stuck inside, driving each other crazy. We both look up every once in a while, out the window where the rain still falls. And we wait, and wait, and wait...