Spring is in the Air

It is hard to believe that it is spring already.  We have had some wild weather here in northeast Michigan. It is hard for us not to blog and talk about record breaking weather.  I'm a little late in blogging about the winter storm that we experienced on Sat. March 3rd. We had no power for 12 hours during the storm, but was lucky enough to get ours restored compared to others in the area that were without power for days.

Our Road

Pasture

Digging out the next day

As you can see in the above pictures, it was a very wet heavy snow. We had at least 18 inches more on top of what we had gotten on Leap Day.  It took my husband hours to plow us out on his tractor. It was very beautiful outside the day after the storm as you can see in the above picture.

Now we have gone from the beautiful winter scene above to mud season here at the ranch. We have been experiencing some very summer like temps. We are running 30 to 40 degrees above our average temperature for this time of year, breaking all kinds of records.  All of that snow melted in two days.  We live on the Ocqueoc River and the alpacas pastures and our property are a part of that watershed.  This means that the open farm fields 3 miles west of our property melted snow runs through our property down to the river.

Water in pastures

Driveway to barnyard

Girls Pen

Other signs that spring is here are the return of all of the song birds, predator birds and of course the Turkey Vultures. I happened to get a picture of one sitting on this old homestead.

Turkey Vulture

Of course spring also means BABIES here on the ranch. Eva our dairy goat is the first one due any day. Look at the girth on this gal. I'm thinking she is going to have triplets again.

Eva

I also wanted to share one more picture for this post. I happened to get a good picture of the moon during the day. It was not quite full, but it sure was big and beautiful.

Moon in the daylight!

I will be posting more pictures on our facebook page. Make sure to like us if you haven't already.
Happy Spring everyone!

Leap Day Snow & Ice Storm

I know we have had a mild winter here in North East Michigan, but I think Mother Nature is now trying to play "catch up".  We had snow and freezing rain here yesterday. We now have to "dig out" the alpaca pens so they will be able to walk  and pronk. We have some hard pack snow drifts as you can see in this picture by one of the chicken coops.

Snow Drift

The alpacas do not mind snow, they just don't like deep snow as it is hard for them to walk in.

A few of the girls

 Guys

As you can see they will cush in the snow and chew their cud. These guys are very content.

Our Maremma guard dogs fair very well in the snow. Meadow loves to sit on top of the snow piles to better watch the barnyard during the day. We have to tie her up in the daytime, as she will not let the mail person drive down our private road to deliver our mail. She will actually sit in the middle of the road and bark at the cars to stop them. We have tried and tried to get her to stop doing this, but she thinks it's part of her job to protect the alpacas, goats and our property.

Meadow

Pan doesn't mind the snow either. Here is a picture of him being the "gate guardian".

Pan

I'm not complaining though as my heart goes out to all of those people who live in the south, where they had those terrible tornadoes yesterday.

Mother nature can paint a beautiful picture.

Well the good news about all of this, is that we should not have another leap year storm for at least 4 more years!  :)