Spring?

It has felt well and truly like spring here for over a week. We have been having wonderful sunny weather - which makes a nice change after the months of rain and wind that came before.
All the animals are shedding their winter coats, possibly a bit premature, but they must be roasting.
There is blossom on the mirabelle (small red and yellow plums) trees.

Green buds on the elderflowers

The crocus have been and gone and now the daffodils are out

We have three lambs now (we hope for eleven in total). This is the first born and is a girl, we don't know the sex of the other two yet. She is very cute with a little white dot on her head.

On a less happy note, the rising hormones or something seems to have driven the chickens and quail mad. The quail keep pecking each other and have had to be separated in to three cages, one has died. It is hard to pinpoint the culprits, but often it seems to be the males pecking the females. No idea why, the internet seems to suggest quail can be rather pecky, but didn't have specific ideas why. There will need to be a bit of culling I think.

We had three cockerels remaining as we had not got round to killing the two we are not keeping. But then yesterday, I found one dead, with a big hole in the back of it's head. It was still in the enclosure and the fence was one, there were feathers everywhere and a lot had been pulled out of its back. Foxes don't kill like that, there is a faint possibility it was a crow, but most likely it was one of the two other cockerels - neither seem to have a mark on them. Unfortunately it was the one we planned to keep that got killed so we need to chose which one of the remaining two to keep, and kill the other. 

Fortunately I found him not long after he died and was able to pluck and gut him so we didn't lose out there. Just looks slightly more battered than normal.

Despite this upset the chickens are laying well. We are planning on moving them over a little bit out of the water run off from the barn roof and in to the shade and shelter of the ruined sheep fold.