The weather man has just told us that it is the first day of spring and although the weather does not feel much like it, the frogs have no doubt about it! They have been gathering in the ponds for a week or so now, the little males poking their heads out of the water and calling for the much larger females to join them. Soon their favourite ponds will be full to the brim with frogspawn.
One of our most satisfying achievements in the garden has been the revival of the wild daffodils in the goat run. When we took over it was a mass of brambles and the first spring that David tried to shoe them to me we could only find one bloom and a few spindly leaves. Much longer and they would have been completely crowded out. The goats have munched their way through all the brambles now and there were more daffodils than ever last year. We have a lot of cultivated daffs that Davids parents and grandparents planted as well, but my favourites are the little wild Lentem Lillies, as my mother always calls them. They are only three or four inches tall and their petals have a strange, almost papery feel to them, not quite as yellow as their trumpets – altogether a charming little plant. I have made sure that the bulb sites are not grazed from just after Christmas until about the middle of June, so that they are not eaten or trampled on and get plenty of time to build up their bulbs after flowering. Sometimes I end up with so funny shaped sheep and goat pens but its well worth it for “a host of golden daffodils”.
The sheep now get a daily ration of concentrated food as well as hay and a pair of opportunistic carrion crows hang around each morning to see if there is anything left for them in the trough. So far they have been out of luck, as Beryl makes sure that every last crumb is licked out. As a child I was told “If you
see a carrion crow with its pals its a rook, but if you see a rook on its own, then its a carrion crow”. Unfortunately,
this is not always the case as carrions often feed in flocks
with other members of the crow family in winter. Although they are roughly the same size, the rook has a very distinctive bare face-patch around its beak which gives it a long-billed appearance. We have nick-named one of the Creaking Jaws as he sounds just like a door opening in a horror film!