The month of May is bringing a surge to our farm.  The change was late in coming, but everywhere life is exploding.  Chicks and piglets are running all over.  Gravid cows and cats are swelling into their fulness.  All the indicator species that help us measure the health of a farm ecosystem are present in abundance, such as snakes in the brush, frogs in the streams, earthworms in the pastures, and dung beetles in (where else?) the dung.  Even animals we don’t favor so much, like rats, are experiencing population booms (much to the pleasure of the aforementioned cats).

We try our best to accommodate all the little live things (again, not so much the rats though…), but sometimes their fecundity is feckless, as in the case of the bird who laid eggs precariously on the hinge at the top of the backhoe’s boom.  Maybe she counted on the fact that I’m a sucker for preserving birds nests.  Add to that my proclivity for procrastination — it just gives me an excuse to put off my backhoe projects for a few weeks while I wait for the nestlings to fledge.