Baby bird carousel.

Spring is still with us, even though the temperatures are in the high 80s. The baby barn swallows have hatched and are now testing their new feathered wings.

Every day, the baby birds are flying around the columns of the porch, not going too far away from their nests, then settling down on the blades of the porch fans. As the breeze blows the blades around, the baby birds just sit there and go round and round as they chatter to each other during the ride.

There were so many baby birds out there this afternoon that I kept the cats inside. Both Mickey and Sweet Pea sat by the windows and looked up at the birds as they rode the fans. The barn swallow babies are just so tiny when they first leave the nests, but they make up for their size with their songs.

The quail are still here... sometimes three and four at a time are walking around the yards. Gatsby will try and chase them down from time to time, but I don't think he's trying very hard. I'm sure he could catch them if he wanted to-- I think Gatsby is more interested in the baby bunnies that he gets from time to time. I'm hoping that all the mama bunnies have taken their babies to a cat-less property.

Except for PittyPat, our chickens seem to be on strike here. PittyPat still lays an egg every day, but the others are on vacation. Scarlett is sitting in her empty nesting box, hoping to hatch an imaginary egg. (She went through this 'broody stage' last year also.)

Prissy and Daisy have both stopped laying their daily eggs-- neither one has left an egg in the nesting boxes, even though both of them sit on the nests for an hour every day. Audrey has given us a few eggs during the last couple of weeks, but each one fell to the floor of the coop and broke because she was sitting on the roosting bar when she laid them.

I don't know why their little chicken-minds are so confused, but I'm just going along with the egg-flow here and we'll see what happens. I've even looked around underneath the palms and the rose bushes, thinking that maybe Prissy and Daisy have been hiding eggs in the flowerbeds, but I never find any eggs.

Actually, I haven't looked underneath the palms lately, not since Mickey was out there and found a green snake in the flowerbed.... he chased the snake up one of the crape myrtles and the snake hid itself so well inbetween the leaves that you couldn't even see it. Mickey knew the snake was up there, though, and he sat at the base of the tree and cried.

Needless to say, I did not help Mickey get up the tree to the snake... and I didn't go out there under the tree and bring Mickey in the house. I just left Mickey right where he was, meowing for all he was worth. The snake stayed up in the tree, and I waited till Mickey got tired of pleading with the snake to come down from its hiding place.

Baby birds riding on the fan-carousel, chickens trying to hatch imaginary eggs, snakes hiding in crape myrtles. Spring-time in the Hill Country, minus the Spring rains-- we haven't seen a drop of rain here since the middle of January. Thankfully, we haven't seen any of the wild fires that have been marching around the state.