after Easter

Hello again, hope you all had a good Easter?

Our snow is nearly gone now and our mob of ducks has re-discovered the frog pond - they seem to have done exploring the muddy ditch for now.

Even when all the others are out of the pond, Honey prefers to remain in the water.  She jumps out quickly when she sees me, as if she'd done something wrong.  She still worries me - I shall get some Calcium tablets for her, see if that improves her condition.

Having cleaned out and re-filled the duck huts I had to go to the old donkey shelter to fetch some more plastic sacks for the soiled duck bedding.  So I went out with the camera, took lots of photos, had a chat with a nice neighbour and enjoyed the warm sunshine after the bitter cold this morning.  The nature pond was not full yet:

 
                                                           In front on the right you can see one of the 2 "goat willows" that Native Forestry planted at the edge of the pond.

Looking back I could see the ducks near the old fence ...

... and Honey was sitting in the very place where she got herself tangled in the electric fence and I had to cut her out of it a few weeks ago.

The three from the bottom hut got up from their siesta when they saw me - I didn't get Candi into the picture who was just getting up from under the fence you can see the shadow of.

Filling the containers near the frog pond again [the hose was FREE OF ICE for the first time in ages] I was amazed to see we had two large patches of frog spawn  -  that pond had been frozen this morning!

Just before dinner on Easter Sunday I got worried because I couldn't see the ducks anywhere.  I knew they'd given up digging in the ditch near the stile, but wondered if they had gone into the ditch further up, as I could suddenly see one or two of them reappear from behind the bottom hut.  So I went to investigate, camera in hand, and saw that everything was peaceful, all nicely separated into groups, and there was no escape into the ditch to worry about:

Also on Easter Sunday I had a wonderful surprise when I saw that my house lime [great birthday present from Gerd and Maria from 2 years ago] was flowering for the first time!  One or two other plants in the sun lounge are flowering busily too: