The littles visit the bigs, another gallon plus of maple syrup and we can see the ground...in places!

After the crazy weather yesterday snow, rain, ice, wind everything at once, we had a calmer weather day today. It was still windy at times but not too bad. Amazingly we suddenly have a fair bit of bare ground in the farmyard! Did the wind blow away the snow from that section? Or more likely the rain washed away the snow. There's still plenty of snow about but the bottom 1/3rd of the birds yard is looking pretty bare and they love it. They also love the bits of greenery on some branches that fell from evergreen trees in the wind yesterday. One more thing to love, a pop up pond has formed for the ducks. Bad weather seems to have brought good things to our flock.

The little chicks are just about 6 weeks old now, outgrowing the brooder.

Time to set up a visit to the coop area.

This is fun.

Littles meet the bigs.

Having winter chicks hasn't been too hard since we're nearly to spring I don't think they'll need to stay indoors overly long. I do think I'll be able to move them to the coop within the next week or so where they will have their own space until the older birds are used to them. I realised that in the covered, wrapped run it was much warmer than outside and I could even dig into the ground some even though most of the ground outdoors is still frozen solid. The run turned out to be a great place to let the chicks meet the older birds and have a good peck around in the dirt. The coop stays very reasonable at nights so the chicks should be fine when they move out there. We'll acclimate and then make the move.

A pop up pond!

Still a lot of snow around...

But magically a nice bare of snow area in the farm yard!

A bit of wonderful for the birds, suddenly there is a large bare of snow area in their yard! The chickens and ducks are thrilled with this development.

What else, well I finished off another gallon of maple syrup, a gallon and a quart nearly that makes this year's grand total so far-2 gallons and (almost) 1 quart. We made the rounds picking up animal feed at the feed store, also picked up some bagged shavings from a lumber yard so I can do a full coop cleaning soon.