The river shoulders its banks apart. Rain comes. The air hangs swollen: opportunity, promises, humidity, warmth. The aspens go first, their catkins unfurling into long swaying tails, the tiny leaves that start as a vague haze of green and then grow. They glow, florescent yellow-lime-life-colored, paintstrokes from a sudden new palette on the hillsides. Beneath, bloodroot and dandelion lift their faces, shy trout lilies and crimson trillium. Slowly behind them come the more hesitant: maples, alders, larches, violets and columbine.

An orange hen went broody back in April, and last week her eggs began to hatch. Having raised chicks only from cardboard boxes, nobody knew quite what to do; except, of course, the hen. She herded the chicks over to the waterer and showed them how to drink, settled herself carefully on the rest of the as-yet unhatched clutch and let the chicks burrow down beneath her, fluffed up all her feathers, and screeched at anyone who came too near.

The piglets came last week, as well. Two of them, one brown and one pink with spots. Both outrageously cute and demonstrably smart: they needed to stay in their crate for a day or so to get used to the new location, and we decided the best way to feed them would be with those bottles used for hamsters and the like. At first, of course, they tried just sucking as they would on any other bottle, and as had worked for them on every other bottle they'd seen before. Biting and head-butting came next, but within about ten minutes, they'd figured out the little valve and were grunting happily away at their milk. By the next feeding, they hardly spilled a drop. Once we let them out, they also figured out the electric fence and found the one spot they could wiggle under - and proceeded to do so immediately. Luckily, they're friendly and curious, so rounding them up involved more coaxing and little chasing.

Last week, the week of insanely cute baby animals, was our last week on the first farm. We start Monday on our new farm, where we won't even have dial-up. J has a pretty good video of the pigs that he's planning to upload before we enter into the internet desert, so keep an eye out over on farmtime. And if you happen to be in Montpelier on Saturdays, stop by the farmer's market and say hi.

Ramps! Oh hell yes. Spring for real.

A good mouser,
and he gets fed in round with
the cows and chickens, but not too much:
a working cat, so keep him hungry. And the barn
is undeniably mouse-free.

But then what?
The small bodies pile up:
moles, chipmunks,
baby squirrels,
just-returned songbirds
caught in mid-song.

Twice a day I scruff him,
and the fear-frozen thing drops
paws up, shaking,
and I throw him in the house and hope.

Of course he doesn't know
the difference between pest
and wild. To him, they are the same:
a swift-beating heart with sweet-tasting blood,
a bright dark eye, a game to play out slowly
to its end.

After the first thunderstorm of the season (of the year!) the frogs in the marshy field sang their cold little three-chambered hearts out. The weather report issued flood and fire warnings both yesterday, but that was before the storm, when a week of hot weather brought up the grass and dried all of last year's fallen leaves. Today the mud sucks softly at my boots - which J's mom bought me for my birthday last year, and which I've already nearly busted, as they are designed to be very cute and not necessarily to muck an entire barn - and when I let the chickens out they get busily to work finding the earthworms that came up for air.

Before the storm yesterday, we built an egg-mobile for them and set up a few hundred feet of fence. (Couldn't find a good link - the egg-mobile is a portable coop so we can move them about and let them graze.) Then we herded them all into the smallest part of the coop and set to chicken-catching. Chicken-catching involves being faster than the chickens, who are surprisingly fast, and/or sneaking up on the chickens, who are prey animals and therefore pretty sensitive to being snuck up on. Alternately, and especially when you've got the whole flock to choose from, it involves wading into the middle of them, and grabbing. Best is if you can get both legs at once, but one'll do if you can get the other real quick. Once they're upside-down, they mostly go quiet. I can catch and hold about three at once; N. the garden manager can get four or five. They're heavier than you think.

Catching the mean rooster comes about by accident when he flies at your face and you just grab him - feet in one hand and neck in the other. Catching the other rooster is much easier than you expect because it turns out he's a scaredy-rooster and he runs and hides in a corner and is very easy to grab. (I tried to think of another word so that I wouldn't use "grab" three times in a row, but really that's the only word for it. And scroll down a bit to the video on that link up there to see the second rooster do his thing.)