It's spring

We've got all the signs now: melting snow, wind, flooding, thunderstorms, and tornadoes nearby, luckily not too near.  
I found two ticks on dog muzzles and applied Frontline to all the dogs.   

The other day David and I heard some woodcock (they go peent, a nasal buzzy sound), then we got to see them doing their courtship flight.  They fly almost straight up and down over fields at dusk, and their wing feathers make a whistling noise that sounds like they are singing.   

Since I am not poetical, here is a description from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac:

... the bird flutters skyward in a series of wide spirals, emitting a musical twitter.  Up and up he goes, the spirals steeper and smaller, the twittering louder and louder, until the performer is only a speck in the sky.  Then, without warning, he tumbles like a crippled plane, giving voice in a soft liquid warble that a March bluebird might envy.   A few feet from the ground he levels out and returns to his peenting ground, usually to the exact spot where the performance began, and there resumes his peenting."

The big excitement of the week, in addition to the woodcock, was when I saw a pair of  trumpeter swans fly over the farm.  They don't stay around, so it's a very brief excitement. 

The brown landscape is starting to turn green, at last.

Training pen, AKA pond

Hank in the barn (AKA indoor pond)

Ben driving the sheep across the yard to a grazing spot on the other side of the house

A sheep finds a good scratching bush for itchy spring hair

lambs taking a rest

It was 75 degrees yesterday and the lambs and I soaked up some sun and lazed around while the ewes were grazing.  It felt soo good.   Today we are having some cloudy and windy weather.