Posts Tagged ‘horses’
Sailing Again
The shade sail is up for the season!
Cyndie floated the idea of trying to make this happen before she needed to leave for an appointment in about an hour. If it wasn’t for her prompt, I would have let this slip to some other time. Since she asked, I decided to jump and make it happen.
I hadn’t thought through the steps in advance, so I just dove in and made decisions on the fly. Everything seemed to work just fine, and we got it completed in the allotted time. Later, on a walk with Asher, I spotted Mia already standing with her head and neck within the shadow. It is a wonderful reward every time I see them taking advantage of the shade.
While Cyndie was waiting for me to retrieve a second ladder, she noticed the horses’ eyes were getting swarmed by flies. Seems early to me for them to need masks already, but why wait?
Not long after, I spotted one of the gray masks on the ground in the hay field. It was Swings who had wriggled her way free of it. I waited until they were eating their afternoon feed to offer Swings a different version of mask, and she willingly accepted it.
I think the masks are begrudgingly accepted by the horses as a necessary evil. The face coverings are annoying, but not as annoying as the flies.
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Dodging Downpours
Thunder and lightning dominated our morning, all the way from the wee hours when I was trying to stay asleep, through our walk with Asher in the woods, and tending to horse chores. It wasn’t a constant storm, though. The rain was intermittently gushing and then stopping completely for varying spans of time.
We chose to delay even starting out the door until one obvious radar blob cleared our airspace. Our walk was pleasant, and we stayed dry everywhere except our boots, awash in the sloppy footing.
During the interval we were with the horses, we ended up trapped under the overhang two different times, waiting out short cloudbursts that suddenly occurred. Each lasted only a short time, allowing us to continue with our tasks without getting soaked.
Cyndie noticed a new level of hair rubbed into the braids of twine we wrapped around the overhang support posts. The mares were biding their time under the protection of the roof with some self-grooming while the deluges were pouring down.
Now that the rainstorms have moved beyond us, the world outside looks too soggy to be inviting. A little sunshine would do wonders to inspire us away from otherwise leisurely indoor pursuits.
I expect that Asher will encourage us to get back outside on his regular schedule, no matter what the weather offers. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
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Creative Solutions
In more than a decade of living here with horses, I have never gotten around to making an effort toward improving my primitive methods of composting their manure. If I were truly serious about maximizing my operation, I could have put in a base material on top of the bare ground and installed a roof to avoid rainstorms from saturating the piles.
Yesterday, as I was turning over the lone pile that has been cooking for a while, I was dealing with the inevitable tendency of the drying material to resist holding a cubic shape. It naturally slides off to become much more of a pyramid. Since the outer 6 inches won’t be actively composting, the narrowing top portion of the pile is much less efficient than a cubed shape.
Having contemplated a lazy man’s method of a walled fixture to square up the sides, I finally took steps to test my theory.
With my mindset of wanting to reuse materials, I headed down to the hay shed and scrounged for three pallet possibilities. Right in front, I found a scrap roll of 1/4-inch hardware cloth covered in pigeon droppings. How appropriate, I thought.
I stapled the hardware cloth to two of the pallets and relied on the third having minimal gaps between its boards. Grabbing some loose polypropylene twine lying nearby, I put everything on a wheelbarrow and headed to the compost area. Crudely tying the corners of the pallets together, I tossed the pile inside, easily making it much taller than previously possible.
Why it took me so long to do this is a testament to procrastination.
There is an area in the paddock where the clay soil at the surface is pottery-grade quality. When it gets wet, the weight of the horses sinks their feet down a dramatic depth. The soil around that spot has less clay, but is equally messy when wet. So it doesn’t make sense to me how the horses can create a dry path at an angle across the middle of this otherwise disastrous zone.
I don’t know how they do it, but I wish they would make paths like this in all the other messy areas of the paddocks for all of our sakes.
Creative solutions R us.
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Random Crashing
It’s all about the weather. The conditions we awoke to yesterday morning were right up there with the most challenging we have faced, primarily due to the precipitation falling while temperatures were right around freezing. It wasn’t a harsh cold like a winter day, but a little bit worse in the way of bone-chilling, soaking wet cold.
The horses were shivering more than we liked to see, and Mia’s blanket was half off and dragging in the mud. Luckily, she stood still while we removed that and put on a fresh dry one. While the horses were occupied with their morning feed, Cyndie began cleaning out the inside of the barn so we could offer them a chance to come inside. We decided on a plan of leaving the stalls wide open and giving them the ability to come in or out as they wished without restrictions.
Since the last two times that we put them in stalls and closed the doors were disastrous, mostly due to Mix’s PTSD tantruming, we wanted to test whether they would choose to come in on their own to get a little extra shelter if we didn’t lock them in. There was fresh water, hay, and a small serving of feed in each stall.
They were all pretty skittish about coming in and showed no sign of being comfortable enough to relax and take advantage of the shelter. There were frequent moments of urgent exits and crashing into doors and each other, but then they would wander in tentatively again for another try. Swings was confident enough to spend extended time eating and drinking in the first open stall. She was comfortable enough to pause for a pee while in there.
Eventually, she made her way to the opposite corner stall and spent a little time checking it out. Mia barely made it inside the front door because Mix and Light were busy not making their minds up and nervously rushing out as quickly as they had tiptoed in.
After we grew weary of waiting for them to calm down, we kicked them out and closed the door so we could get back to the house to feed Asher and have some breakfast for ourselves.
When we came out around noon, the ice accumulation on tree branches was growing to between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick. Whenever a gust of wind shook loose the ice, the crashing sound on the metal roofs of the shop-garage, and the barn made it sound like entire branches were coming down.
It was good the horses weren’t inside the barn because that would have freaked them out big time. The temperature was climbing a few degrees above freezing, and the horses appeared to have warmed up enough that they had stopped shivering.
We decided to keep the barn shut, but we swung the alleyway gates out so they could have access to the center space under the overhang that is normally reserved for us, leaving the door into the barn closed. Watching them on the surveillance camera, we saw Mix claim the center spot, which left Mia with an entire side of the overhang to herself.
They were done crashing around, so all that remained were large shards of ice raining down out of the trees at random when wind gusts shook them loose. It was no less unnerving for us.
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Distributing Treats
We thought the rain would arrive during the afternoon yesterday based on the radar scans, but it didn’t start falling until well after dark. In the middle of the afternoon, we made a special trip to the barn to team up on putting rain sheets on the horses. To my surprise, Mia didn’t move away as we were covering the other three while plying them with treats.
Since she was right there, I tossed a lead rope over her neck and offered her a few treat bites, while Cyndie quickly wrangled a sheet over her back. Mia was doing fine, but there were leg straps on the back that Cyndie didn’t want to bother Mia with, so she was trying to knot them up to keep them from dragging. While she was doing that, the other horses started to crowd us, hoping for more treats.
We ended up in bad positioning, and Mix decided to lash out at Mia with a kick. That riled us up, and things got a little chaotic as Cyndie and I took turns chastising Mix while trying to calm all the others and not lose the progress on getting Mia’s sheet fully buckled.
It never pays to take shortcuts. We really should have staged them on separate sides before starting, but having them all standing together made it tempting to go for it before any of them had time to reject the idea. In the end, we got them all covered in advance of the cold and wet conditions that could last for the next few days.
Cyndie saw a video of a homemade indoor activity challenge that we thought Asher would go for, so we collected the pieces and strung them up yesterday.
His favorite toy of late is a ball that we put some of his dry food in for him to roll around until individual bites fall out from all the gyrating. We thought he would surely get excited to flip the cups and bottles on a string to gobble up all the pieces that drop out.
Well, he showed little interest in having anything to do with this plastic trash that he knows is off-limits when it is in the recycle bin. I thought it was good that he could see the treats at the bottom, but he’d probably like it more if they were painted bright orange to look more like dog toys similar to his ball.
He doesn’t need to see the food inside them; he knew what was in there from across the room because he could smell it. He simply wanted those enticing tidbits to be in his orange ball, the way he likes it.
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Overlapping Naps
Asher and I headed down to the barn mid-morning to retrieve the feed buckets and clean up any fresh messes under the overhang. The first thing I noticed when we stepped out of the house was Mia standing all alone in the round pen. We found the other three horses huddled together on one side of the overhang, positioned so the warm sunshine was covering one full side of each of them.
It was a normal hour for them to be napping, and they appeared to be all in at the moment. Mix really should have found a spot to lie down, because she was ridiculously close to toppling to the ground. Her head sagged lower and lower as her slumber deepened, until it almost touched the ground, and her back legs buckled, jarring her awake for an instant.
When I finished cleaning up around them, I opened the back door of the barn for Asher to lead us on an agenda-less walk. He slowly made his way past the old chicken coop until we were parallel with Mia in the round pen.
There, he sat down to survey the distance for activity, so I sat down beside him. This is one of my great joys of retirement. There was nowhere else I needed to be and nothing else I needed to do in that moment. When Asher eventually lay down, I did, too. I placed a hand on his back and closed my eyes. If I fell asleep and he moved, I hoped I would notice.
I didn’t feel myself falling asleep, but when some sounds and movement suddenly brought me back to consciousness, I could tell I had dozed off. The sound that woke me was Mix arriving and posturing to lie down just on the other side of the fence beside us. She must have gotten fed up with almost falling over. Beyond Mix, I noticed that Mia had already lain down to nap inside the round pen.
It was a wonderfully idyllic scene, the four of us all napping together, except that when Mix lay down, she rolled on her back and rubbed her face and sides on the grass before settling, and those gyrations happening so close to us brought Asher to his feet to observe the spectacle more closely.
I wanted the horses to be able to enjoy a moment of deep sleep on the ground, so to give them more space, I got up with Asher and invited him to continue our meandering stroll around the property.
It was okay that we didn’t get to linger there with them. I was tickled that Mix had shown up to join us while we were snoozing. We were doing overlapping naps.
The horses don’t stay on the ground very long, anyway. As Asher and I followed the back pasture fence line around past the labyrinth, I could see that Swings had come to the far side of the paddock to join in the ground napping, but Mix had already returned to her feet.
Midday napping in the warm spring sunshine is a luxury not to be passed up when the forecast for the next 4 days is filled with threats of cold air and a freezing mix of precipitation.
Of course, Asher and I will simply move our overlapping naps indoors until winter finishes with its latest unnecessary after-the-fact tantrum.
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Horses Walkabout
Just because something has never gone completely wrong before doesn’t guarantee it won’t happen eventually. Horses have an amazing ability for stealth when they so choose. If one were to leave barn doors unlatched and the alleyway gates unchained while focused on adding a few shovels of lime screenings under the overhang, like Cyndie did last night, who knows what could happen?
Cyndie had taken Asher along in the fading daylight after dinner on a trip to the barn to collect empty feed buckets. I was comfortable on the couch in the loft in my after-shower night clothes when I got a call from her, informing me that the horses had gotten out.
There is no hesitation to be had when receiving a message like this. I slipped my bare feet into boots and stepped out the front door to greet all four horses in the yard, looking rather unsettled. My presence was enough to turn them back toward the direction of the barn, where I could hear Cyndie shouting for Asher, who was darting about as if he couldn’t decide whether to herd them or prance around along with them.
Thankfully, when the horses showed a hint of interest in getting back to their safe space, Cyndie was able to open a gate to the small paddock and usher them through it with gentle encouragement.
It had only taken a few seconds of Cyndie being distracted with her task for the horses to move themselves silently up to the unchained alleyway gates and nose their way through. She spotted them as the last of the four disappeared into the barn. Asher had been out by the hay shed, but came running into the barn through the small front door to see what was up.
They must have passed each other because he popped out under the overhang to let Cyndie know something was totally out of order. The horses apparently went straight out the small front door Asher had just come in, because by the time Cyndie got in there after them, they were gone.
She told me they had headed down the driveway in the opposite direction from the house when she called me. From the high point on the driveway, near our rocking chairs on the lookout spot, Cyndie said the horses turned and sprinted on the asphalt at full speed toward the house.
I’m sorry I missed that. It must have been a raucous clamor of hooves and a spectacular sight.
The rule violation that occurred is having left both small barn doors unlatched at the same time that the alleyway gates were unchained. The inside ones can be optional, but only if the outside doors are all latched.
The odds of one, let alone all four of the horses, choosing to test and immediately pass silently through the unchained gates at a time when both barn doors were also unlatched are very unlikely.
But it could happen. They proved that emphatically last night.
Slowly Drying
Every day that it doesn’t rain or snow is a day toward drying out our land. When the overnight temperature drops below freezing, it adds a little freeze-drying effect to help things along.
Granted, it makes it impossible to clean up the overnight manure in the paddocks with my plastic tined scoop tool. It’s no match for the frozen mish-mash of mud craters left by the horses that subsequently get filled with their droppings. I just tell the horses that it’s an opportunity for them to live as most horses do for a while.
Nobody we are aware of would spend the kind of time we do to create such a vast expanse of manure-free paddock space for four retired horses. Well, this time of year, our mares get to witness a lot more composting in place.
The surface dries in a gradient, but not entirely linearly. Partway down the slope tends to dry the fastest, while the area uphill from there, just beyond the barn overhang, stays muddy a little longer. Just this side of the chopped willow tree that can’t figure out how to completely die, stays wet the longest. That water needs to travel from around the driveway loop all the way across that paddock to get to the drainage swale crossing our property from north to south.
The process can take days. I guess we’ve gotten used to it, so I am rarely surprised to find it’s still wet. What is surprising is that one day we will find the ground suddenly seems bone dry. Like it had never even been wet. Like it hadn’t been absolutely saturated for days on end. Nope. It becomes dry and dusty, hard as a rock.
Until the next time it rains. Or, bite my tongue, snows twelve inches.
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Week Apart
At the risk of belaboring the point, here are two images of our home, one week apart:
Sunday, March 15
Sunday, March 22
The temperature swing from Saturday to yesterday was a drop of more than 40 degrees. March weather can be dizzying. I won’t deny an enduring urge to stay snuggled in bed instead of getting up to slog through all the mud on our trails and in the paddocks.
Thank goodness we’ve got the horses to warm our hearts, no matter what version of early spring weather is dished out. They don’t let the mud underfoot bother them. No, they consider it a valuable asset for skin and hair treatments.
Cyndie found that two of them were ready to have their caked-on hair brushed out, while the other two preferred to keep wearing their mud packs. To each their own.
A week from now, it will just as easily be the other way around.
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Momentary Panic
It was a beautiful morning yesterday, with a thick line of fog hovering low across the valley. It completely obscured the view of our neighbor’s buildings on the property south of ours.
The horses were quietly eating from their feed buckets, and Cyndie and I were working together to scoop up manure drops out in the paddocks. Cyndie had her back to the horses, and I was facing them toward the overhang.
Suddenly, a ruckus occurred, and I looked up to see Swings struggling to get out from between Light and the wood fence. When she burst free, it was done very awkwardly. In an instant, before Cyndie could even turn around, Swings was moving right for us, stepping oddly sideways, like she didn’t have control of her body.
I’m not sure how she missed us, because we hardly had time to move, but she brushed past us, flailing sideways the whole way out to the middle of the large paddock. It looked like she was having a seizure of some sort. If not that, my only other perception was of her body being possessed by some entity other than her own.
She stopped moving and dropped her head down low. It reminded me of the way Light behaved when she was in pain from a head wound. After a moment or two, Swings regained her composure. She took a few steps and then laid down to do a normal-looking roll. When she got up from that, she had a moment of shakiness before slowly making her way up the slope toward the overhang to where she was before the whole drama unfolded.
It was the strangest thing I have ever seen in all the years we’ve had horses, but for some reason, not as unsettling as I would expect. It was good to have been there to witness it together. We kept our eyes on Swings for a little longer, but saw no indication of anything out of the ordinary in the time following.
Cyndie immediately reported the incident to the folks at This Old Horse. Since Swings had returned to normal, they felt that no action was necessary beyond watching her closely the rest of the day.
We spent some extra time with the horses in the middle of the day, and Cyndie was able to do some grooming on several of them to varying degrees. It was particularly rewarding to see Mia be so receptive to attention. Cyndie was able to completely brush out her mane, which had been a severe tangle of fairy knots.
Swings seemed fine the rest of the day, leaving us a little mystified about what caused her moment of panic, but it serves to keep us cognizant that she is 31 years old, and each day she makes it through without trouble is a blessing to be cherished.
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Relative Something 