Feathery Friday

 

No, not a new photo challenge or themed meme, just a regular post….about backyard birds.

I have to admit I don’t feed the birds during the summer. I figure they can find plenty of food on their own (like they did with my peach and apple trees, thank you very much!). But during the winter I enjoy feeding the birds, mostly because I find I have more time and excuses to sit inside the nice, warm house and watch them fluttering about while they enjoy the bountiful buffet of seeds and suet blocks.

This year, though, winter snuck up on me and I didn’t remember to stock up on bird seed in time for the first snow. I love to watch the birds in the snow best of all. But thankfully, I did have a small amount of bird seed left over from last year, which the birds seemed grateful to have, just the same.

I’m glad I was able to feed the birds because they were the only critters that wanted to be outside. My chickens wouldn’t even step one foot out of their house and insisted I feed them inside instead. And even my llamas, goats and sheep refused to leave the barn all day.

My mare, Baby Doll left the barn for about an hour or two after her breakfast, but the wind and pelting snow was even too much for her to take and she mosied on back into the barn to escape the freezing cold weather.

(A photo from my balcony that I took Thursday morning, of South Mountain, which is north of us)

I’ve had a gut feeling we’re going to have a long, cold winter. You know how animals tend to do odd things when a storm is coming? Well, just last week we were driving down route 66 at dusk and a herd of about 6 deer were standing right there in the road. We had to stop so we wouldn’t hit them and I honked the horn until they moved off the road. I was too startled to grab my camera so I have no photos. But this was a strange event because we’ve lived up in our mountains now for 2 years and have yet to see any deer, especially not on the roads.

And although we see and hear coyotes at night all the time, we’ve not had any come close to our house ever since we got our llamas. And we’ve never seen them during the day. But just before this snowstorm we were sitting at the kitchen table at lunchtime and this coyote walked right up to our chicken coop beside our kitchen window. If it wasn’t for Zuni barking at it and going crazy at the window, I don’t think it would have bothered to run off either.

Can you believe it was down in the low teens here at night?! And it didn’t even get above 30 during the day. The ground was frozen solid and I had to plug in all the electric water buckets because the regular water buckets kept freezing over. I wasn’t expecting it to get this cold and stupid-me forgot to remove the hose from the water spigot pump and it was frozen (not good!). Two years ago I forgot to remove the hose from the pump and it caused the pipe to rupture and we had to spend several weeks hauling water up the hill to the barn, in the snow, ice and wind, until the ground thawed out and we could get someone over here with a backhoe to dig up the pipe and repair it. What a nightmare! I am so hoping that my forgetfulness didn’t cause any damage and that the pump will thaw out on Friday as our temps are supposed to get back up into the 30’s and 40’s.

I’m also hoping that all this snow melts quickly so that the trails won’t be a muddy, snowy, slippery mess for the Ghost Riders to the Rescue Trail ride on Saturday.

  

Crossing my fingers and toes…………….