It is April 9. I’m pretty sure our mama robin is back from her winter vacation along with many other robins. Unfortunately, their timing is off this year and they have returned to a garden covered in several feet of snow. They can usually be seen snacking on worms all day long in the field next door, but this year the only visible grass is a thin strip along the road verges or close to house walls. That’s where our mama is spending her days… she can be seen any time of day hopping about here (she’s on the other side of the front doorstep in this photo). For company she has a couple of very stunted daffodils: No blooms yet, but a couple of yellow buds.
Mama robin, April 9, 2015
There have been several reports on CBC about migratory birds starving this year on account of it not being very spring like, so I put some fruit out on a plate for mama robin in case she was desperate. I’ll be watching for any action around the nest site in the next week or two but with spring being weeks (months?) late this year, I am not holding my breath. She laid her first egg on April 25 last year — interested to see how much later it will be this year. The same goes for spring peepers and other creatures waiting for the melt to happen.
The robins all look as pissed off as this one! Only snow and ice and muddy gravel as far as the eye can see.
In other news, the guinea pigs (Clover and Lucky) are desperate to get out and eat some fresh grass and frolic in their awesome two-storey outdoor cage. (They told me this by squeaks and whistles.) They have had a couple of runs on the snow-banked, semi-frozen back deck this winter and one solitary trip to the grass strip shown above (yesterday, April 8). I’m pretty sure they were out in their run in March last year. We’re not the only ones stuck indoors feeling cabin feverish.
witches whiskers 