Visiting Sheep lambs / spring cleaning birds nests

We visited a friend who sells sheep cheese and sheep meat. He makes the cheese from the milk of his own sheep, so he has a lot of sheep with a lot of lambs. The lambs are so adorable. The children loved looking at them, how they bounced around and drank at there mother. I am really looking forward to having our own sheep, and of course lambs every year, again. Maybe in 2 years that could be the case.

Birds nests

I love it when I can hear the first birds singing again in the winter. For me that means the biggest and darkest part of winter is over and spring can not be long. So it was high time to clean out the births nests we had hung up 2 years ago. We have 3 births hotels for 3 nests of which the first nest in the first hotel was not used and the last nest in the last hotel was not used and the wooden shoe was not used. So we cleaned out 9 nests and it was high time because the space was filled out, because every time the birds breed they will build a new nest on top of the old one. Some nests where build as we typically expect a births nest, open to the top. We also found a nest like a ball with a hole on the side.

Beside the births nests we hung up, the birds also nest in the wall above. These are hollow stones with damage here and there leaving enough space for the birds to go in and out. Since the wall is southeast facing it will warm up nicely when the sun shines. We only have sparrows nesting here.

To build new nests the birds will find enough material here, but what they also love to use is dogs hair. Since one of our dogs needed to be brushed, I provided some nest material. The next day there is hardly anything left of the dogs hair.

Many of the nesting possibility’s are claimed already, so I hope there will be a lot of new birds this year. We love watching the young birds learning to fly.