Spring Cleaning - Before and After

During the Winter I keep layering more clean bedding on top of the old stuff, hopefully the lower stuff starts composting and giving off some heat to help keep the birds warm. My ducks however kept ruining all my plans and throwing water all over the place. Sigh. So I had to remove everything (frozen solid, with the help of poor Mr. Badger) a couple of times over the winter. The chickens HATE walking through the snow, so it worked out for them. It all piled up outside the coop during the Winter ... but come Spring it all needs to be cleaned up. So I spent my Saturday afternoon moving all the old bedding to the compost pile.

My chickens discovered that as I dug I was uncovering worms. So of course, as I am trying to make any piles of straw, they start digging through it for tasty nom noms. It made the job take a little longer, but it was pretty cute watching their excitement finding worms. I started picking them out myself and handing them to the chickens. Scribbles (my rooster) would delicately take them from my hand and then move off a bit, put it on the ground and call his ladies over for a snack :3 He loves taking care of his ladies!! (I didn't see him eat a single one ...)

In stark contrast ... I collected some worms to give to the ducks (they don't like to be around all the commotion of digging stuff out) and I tossed them towards the ducks. My Welsh Harlequin drake (you can see him in the after picture next to the white duck) was shoving the duck ladies out of the way and scarfing each worm down as fast as possible. Ducks!