Tracks, scat, and wildlife visitors.

It is lovely to be keenly aware of just how much more daylight we're getting as I'm out and about in -8 degree weather feeding and caring for the animals. Just being out and about at the same time every day gives a lot of connection to understanding time as the light changes. There are times I think that having flood lights around the house to get more done in the dark hours would be good. Then I remember that doing night time construction in below freezing weather isn't fun or terribly productive anyhow. One of the things that light showed me this morning though, was tracks from some of our visiting wildlife in the wake of the storm.

The first thing I spotted was these tracks, and of course the first thing I did was make sure all of the rabbits were in their hutches, even though it's a bit small to be them. Better safe than sorry of course. The Lady of the house had noted to me yesterday that when she was taking in and putting out water to keep it liquid for the rabbits she'd noticed tracks going near the hutches. Specifically under the hutch of Twilight, our prima donna that keeps throwing her feeder, with food in it no less. It seems that the rabbit has been coming and taking advantage of that food, and the fallen hay as well. Not an unwise thing to do given the weather. Looking around at the tracks, what I noticed on the ground away from the hutches was rabbit manure. It is a different size and color than what our rabbits produce. It's smaller, and a lighter brown. Of course the cellphone camera couldn't show that in the dawn lighting, even when it's brighter. It was a little too cold for me to try for long though since to take photos with my phone I have to have a bared hand because it's a touch screen. At some point we really need to get a better camera to keep doing photos for the blog, and have them look better. Either way, we know that our rabbit visitor is still around and eating well. The dog goes chasing after it when we see it, but it's never gone for long. It just tends to not be around when we're outside. The funny thing to me was that I spotted the rabbit out in the dark last night before the dog did. As one spends a lot of time in a place a shadow or light out of place stands out very clearly.

The other visitor lately is a small red squirrel. Today I actually found tracks leading down to the chicken run. I suspect it's picking up every last scrap of chicken feed they don't bother eating during the night when we're not out there regularly. Due to the light dusting of snow last night over the cleared parking area I got this nice shot of the tracks that really stood out. It almost looks like someone carefully took stamps to make tracking perfect tracks given that every single bit of the track shows perfectly.

Obviously the chickens are weathering just fine, I'd like to keep things from going near the chickens, but of course that is a pipe dream without having concrete barriers with electric deterrence. As it is, I suspect that during the day at least the Rooster is going to be doing just fine at keeping other critters out. He's still not the most bold thing in the world, but he now rules the roost instead of being bossed around by the hens. Our top hen still will beat him up from time to time, but he's ended up big and good looking. So far he hasn't started standing up to any of us which is a good thing. We didn't spend time making our chickens super human friendly, but none of them are scared of us, and they aren't aggressive which is the important thing. At this point in the winter even with a week of sub zero temperatures ahead of us I'm no longer worried about the chickens surviving 'till laying time of the year anymore given how hearty they've been. Barring weasels of course!