Posts Tagged ‘horses’
Fresh Blanket
The old snowpack has melted and refrozen several times and was beginning to look rather sad. It’s been polished by whipping winds and covered with leaves, branches, and shrapnel from trees, knocked down by birds and squirrels. Well, it has a whole new look today. It snowed all day yesterday and everything is now covered with a fresh white blanket.
At the time of that photo, we had about 8.5 inches on the ground. After dinner, when I was out plowing the driveway, it snowed another half-inch.
The horses can always retreat to the protection of the overhang and I closed gates between the two paddocks to give the two chestnuts unrestricted access to one side. Under the overhang is where we hang hay nets, so the hay stays dry. Of course, then the horses can stay dry, too, while eating.
I’m dumbfounded why the chestnuts, Mia and Light, choose to stand out in the snow anyway. Swings, the eldest of the four mares, always chooses the overhang for shade when it is hot and shelter when it is windy or wet.
Here is what the difference looks like:
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That’s Mia on the left and Swings on the right.
Today is my last day of talking to myself for the past nine days because, if all goes according to plan, Cyndie returns from Florida.
I think Delilah is getting tired of trying to figure out what I am saying, as I have been rambling at length to explain my activities to her in the absence of anyone else around for conversation. She has taken to cocking her head a little and giving me a long blank stare. If my jabbering doesn’t ultimately culminate in something she can eat, she tends to sigh and wander away for another nap.
That is, if it isn’t time for one of her walks. She knows when it is time for our regularly planned outings and never hesitates to make herself very available for each precious occasion. Walks are even more special for a while now because of the fresh blanket of powder we get to romp through.
I get a fresh chance to trudge a wider pathway on our trails for several days. Delilah and I will have it looking nicely packed again in no time. Then all the forest critters will commence dropping things everywhere and I’ll start pining for the next new blanket of snow to show up.
Rinse, and repeat until spring.
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Close Supervision
I was still so excited yesterday morning about the arrival of fresh bags of feed that I snapped a picture to capture the moment. So excited, in fact, I couldn’t hold still to press the button.
Don’t adjust your glasses. Don’t squint your eyes. That is a blurry image.
It’s always a good feeling when the barn is freshly stocked with bales of hay and bags of feed. That positive energy is picked up by the horses and they were in a wonderfully pleasant mood yesterday morning during feeding.
I was still finishing up with cleaning when Mix and Swings approached after all the feed pans had been emptied.
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I think they were comparing notes by way of nose proximity.
“Do you smell what I smell?”
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Mix’s curiosity was satisfied but Swings wanted to get a second whiff.
I was so focused on looking at them that I got startled when I turned to the left and found Light had silently snuck up on the other side of the fence to see if she was missing out on something.
It is such a treat to have them being so social after witnessing their level of hesitancy to be near us when they first arrived last April.
I’m more than happy to have their close supervision of our activity any ol’ time. Especially now that I am practicing more intentional awareness when they are moving behind me (he says after just admitting to being oblivious about Light’s whereabouts a moment ago).
That’s why I wrote, “practicing.”
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Blown Snow
On Monday, I was plowing the driveway to clear the gradual build up of 1-to-2-inch accumulations from the previous couple of weeks and it was wonderfully calm. Yesterday, the latest two inch accumulation of powder on top was being blown across our fields while I wasn’t looking.
I took Delilah outside with me when I needed to do some cleanup shoveling that I had skipped after plowing on Monday. She patiently waited while I worked at each stop: up at the house in front of the garage doors, in front of the shop/garage, and down at the barn to clear in front of the big doors.
While I had the big doors open, I moved a few bales into the barn from the hay shed and then tidied things up in the barn. We were down to our last two bags of feed for the horses and I was anticipating delivery of more any day. I like to have things neatened up for the arrival of more feed.
Upon completion of all my intended tasks, I wanted to reward Delilah’s patience with a long walk to wherever she wanted to go. When we popped out of the woods behind the back pasture, I was surprised to find the path completely filled in by blown snow.
The whole time I had been shoveling around buildings I had been oblivious about how much wind was blowing and the open fields offered up a lot of snow to sweep into drifts.
I trudged through the deep snow, wishing I had my snowshoes on. But then, coming around the corner, the path was nothing but packed snow where no drifting had occurred.
I totally understand why some cultures have many words for snow.
The blown snow made a nice pattern around some stacked rocks near the labyrinth.
Later in the day, when we returned to the barn to set out the afternoon feeding for the horses, there were eleven new bags of feed freshly stacked on the pallets. There’d been a visit from the feed-fairy while we were up in the house having lunch.
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Just Me
Starting today and lasting for a little over a week, it’s going to be just me managing the ranch as Cyndie is flying today to visit her mother in Florida. I’ve been through this solo routine many times but instead of that making it easier, I think the last few times have increasingly revealed how connected Cyndie and I have become at this point of our lives.
Throughout the last week, we have been watching the athletic Olympic performances available on NBC together. It won’t be the same all by myself. I have been frustrated over the number of events, especially hockey, we haven’t had access to that have been broadcast on USA network.
I will particularly miss her editing service for these blog posts. She continually provides helpful feedback on my writing that always makes my posts read better.
Tending to the animals is always half as much work when we share the duties. Now I only have Delilah to help me with the horses until Cyndie returns and what Delilah does down at the barn is never really all that helpful. Mostly, she starts barking a lot if she thinks the horses are misbehaving.
Delilah did a great job of alerting us about someone showing up at our front door yesterday. It was one of the local coyote hunters asking if they could cross our land during a hunt. I made sure to get his contact information this time, in case we have future evidence of the pests lurking on our land.
Surprisingly, Delilah didn’t get riled up over the sound of the hunting dogs cutting through our woods. Later, when I took her for an afternoon walk, she was very interested in all the new foot and paw prints in the snow. I heard a couple of gunshots while the hunt was active, but did not receive any word about whether they were successful or not.
It just eventually gets quiet, the pickup trucks disappear from the road, and the horses stop looking all spooked. At that point, I feel safe to take Delilah outside again.
Now it’s going to be quiet around the house for the next nine days.
Not that I’m counting.
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First Bite
For the first time in my life, I have finally been bitten by a horse. It’s not an occasion people generally keep track of, unless they spend a fair amount of time around horses, I suppose. I have only been around horses for 5 or 6 years.
Our Thoroughbred mare, Mix bit me in the middle of my back yesterday morning. I yelped and cursed and all the horses startled. The other three didn’t know what had happened, but Mix knew. Cyndie responded by making sure Mix knew we were not accepting such behavior. She used her amped up energy and a boundary extension stick to move Mix to and fro around the paddock until the mare finally showed some sign of acquiescence by dropping her head.
In talking it over when we got back in the house, I came up with a possible theory for her behavior.
When the horses first arrived here, Mix, more than the other horses, showed aggressiveness around feeding times. It mostly manifests in her demonstrative body language, taking on stallion-like behaviors of pawing and snaking her neck. She might also chase away or attempt to bite the butts of other horses around her. When we bring out her pan of food, she doesn’t tend to act aggressively toward us.
Lately, when Cyndie or I move around her to scoop poop or hang hay nets while she is gobbling from her feed pan, Mix will sharply swish her tail or pin her ears back and swing her head in our direction to flaunt her command over her food. We have been verbally responding with our disapproval and carrying on with our task at hand to show her she does not direct our activity.
Yesterday, while she was eating and after I completed my scooping, I stood in her vicinity even though I wasn’t working anymore, thinking I might condition her to my unthreatening presence when she has food. When she gestured her displeasure, I calmly held my ground.
This lasted maybe a minute before I moved on to something else. The four horses were finishing the last of the pellets in their feed pans and basically chilling. Maybe moseying down to get a drink or nuzzle a hay net with half interest. I came out to tie up one of the last hay bags. Mix approached and nosed the bag, then lifted her head to inhale the scent of my breath. I tossed the bag over the fence and was tying it to the top board, losing sight of Mix as she moved behind me.
Bam! I felt a wicked pinch on my back and let out a shout. Was she maybe responding to my earlier posturing in her space while she had been eating? It wouldn’t surprise me.
Good thing I was wearing my “space suit” and escaped with nothing more than a tender bruise beneath all the layers.
By the afternoon, we were very pleased to see Mix remained pleasant as I was making two passes around her with the wheelbarrow while she was still eating. We are taking that as a good sign she received the message we were sending earlier that morning.
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Paired Photos
Yesterday morning I was taking extra pictures to chronicle our morning routine for a photo exercise occurring on my virtual community, Brainstorms. Members all over the globe were capturing their lives in images for four days and posting them to provide a simultaneous glimpse of our varied locals and activities.
Of course, mine involved horses and I came up with two sets of images that work best when shown as pairs.
It was a cold morning that was going to become a warm day, so… Blankets on / blankets off.
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I then stepped up beside Light and was taking a picture of her gobbling pellets from a feed pan. She turned to see what I was doing.
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There’s something about a horse’s nose that is just so great up close in a photograph. For all we know, that could be a moose!
Don’t tell her I said that.
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Big Between
We have been living in a pretty peaceful time of late at Wintervale, one I tend to label, “the big between.” Whenever we get a significant block of days without a major weather event or an unexpected life disturbance, it becomes the time between the last one and the inevitable next one.
Delilah was her best-behaved self all day on Saturday. She responded surprisingly quickly in obeying a “drop it” command that she normally resists. She had just made a lightning-fast dash and discovery of a recently departed squirrel just over the snowbank of the driveway. We were on our way back from the barn after feeding the horses and Cyndie was just telling me about startling a hawk when she came out of the house at right about that same spot.
Poor bird didn’t get the benefit of its kill. That is, unless it was keeping an eye on where Cyndie tossed the limp tree rodent over the property line into the neighbor’s woods where it will be out of reach of our dog.
Delilah was rewarded with a fully sanctioned dead animal chewy treat that Cyndie purchases, not made out of squirrels.
Heavy napping soon followed.
A couple of days ago, just as the horses were finishing their pans of feed pellets, I was blessed with a precious interaction with Light toward the completion of my manure scooping.
She approached the wheelbarrow, which they often do, and was checking things out as I walked up with a full scoop. She stepped as close as physically possible to impede me from being able to grab both handles. I dumped the contents of the scoop into the nearly filled wheelbarrow and set down the tool to give Light my full attention.
Not yet confident that I am reading the signals from any of these mares, I attempted to see what combination of hand contact, intensity, and location appeared to meet with her satisfaction. Scratches behind her ears? Under her jawline? Massage her neck? Slide my hands under her blanket?
Scratching her forehead and jawline seemed to elicit the best reaction of eyes closing as if in bliss, with ears happily relaxed. The routine I am used to with these four Thoroughbreds is for them to move away rather soon after we put hands on them, but this time Light was more inclined to lean her forehead into my torso with no hint of wanting to be anywhere else.
It is such a treat to be given so much attention from a horse. Surprisingly, I ended up being the one to break the spell. We had been standing together like that for about ten minutes and I really was on my last scoop and ready to dump the wheelbarrow so I could join Cyndie up at the house for breakfast.
I moved toward the far handle of the wheelbarrow and Light read my intention and slowly backed up so she could turn and mosey over for a drink of water.
I’m hoping the time between that session and my next opportunity to receive similar love from any of the mares is not anywhere as long as the number of quiet days we’ve been enjoying around here lately.
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Chaos Ensued
It wasn’t a stellar start of the day for my unnecessarily grumbly countenance yesterday morning. We are ensconced in a pattern of dry, cold winter days that can tend to chip away at a person’s stoicism against the elements. The temperature reading began with a minus sign once again and we steeled ourselves as usual for the “spacewalk” to exercise Delilah and feed the horses.
It was a wonderfully calm morning and the only sound from the trees was occasional cracking in response to the cycles of freezing and thawing we have had of late. My mood was perfectly balanced between not wanting to be out in the cold at the crack of dawn for another consecutive day and being thrilled to witness the beauty and wonder of a new and beautiful winter morning.
Under the barn overhang, I was met by evidence the horses had been under there all night. If they spend time out in the fields, I don’t scoop up the piles. Under the overhang, we try to remove their manure as fast as they produce it. Maybe it was because there was poop everywhere that one of them decided to do their business over one of the hay boxes.
Half-frozen to a wrought iron corner bracket, it defied convenient clean-up. While dealing with the mess I discovered the box has been kicked enough that it is barely holding together. It kind of took the wind out of my sail of cheerfulness.
Once back in the house, I recovered nicely with a spectacular breakfast of perfectly poached eggs on toast that Cyndie served and I was reclining under a lap blanket absorbing the stories in the daily newspaper. It was deliciously serene when Delilah leaned into my chair to request some scratches.
While I focused on what I was reading, Delilah would rotate her body to move my hand where she wanted me next.
Suddenly, she yelped and snapped at me when I inadvertently pinched her in my overzealous massaging/scratching. I jumped and professed my apologies.
Before we had barely begun to settle ourselves, Pequenita showed up out of nowhere, attacking Delilah with punches and swipes while hissing in anger. Delilah instantly responded in kind with growls and glaring canines. We bumped the side table next to me and knocked my full tumbler of ice water to the floor where the top blew off and cubes and water went everywhere.
Cyndie was on top of Delilah instantly to scold her to get off the cat. She pulled Delilah away and was making the dog lay down in submission and the cat showed up again in full fight mode of hissing and swinging paws at the poor pooch. I was yelling that it wasn’t Delilah’s fault and Cyndie was hollering at both pets.
We have never, ever seen this type of aggression from Pequenita. It seems most likely to us that she was reacting to defend me from Delilah’s reaction to my having pinched her.
It was unprecedented madness of a surprising degree.
Helped me totally get over the angst of the busted, pooped-on hay box.
I got the water and ice cubes cleaned up and both pets calmed down and found themselves separate corners.
Ultimately, our calm serenity was restored, but geesh! Took me a while to get my pulse back to restively reclining mode.
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Circumstantial Evidence
We think we know what happened, but we have no proof. Today’s tale (no pun intended) needs to begin with a preamble that will put readers in a similar state of mind to the one I was in when I arrived at the shocking scene.
It was yesterday morning and I was walking Delilah like any other day. She sniffed at the typical spots and paused to take care of nature’s call twice, per usual. Our intermediate destination was the barn, to feed and clean up after horses, so I encouraged Delilah to turn onto the trail that most quickly brought us to the path around the back pasture.
Before we reached the last turn towards the barn, Delilah startled me with an immediate lunge off the path and made three strong leaps into a thick bramble of raspberry stalks and small trees before I could lock her leash and halt her progress. Every indication from her body told me there was a critter in the vicinity as she held her “High Alert!” stance and strained against the leash.
I froze with her and did my darndest to see any hint of movement from an animal intent on escape. Nothing. It wasn’t the first time she had what I consider to be a false alarm, so I pulled her back out of there and we continued toward the barn with both of us keeping a keen eye on the trees to our left for any movement.
It was while relocating equine fecal matter that I came upon the unsettling find.
There was a large chunk of hair matching the color of Swing’s tail laying in the snow. I immediately got Cyndie’s attention and she reacted with a level of shock that aligned with my concern. Upon finding footprints in the snow by the manure pile, I told Cyndie about Delilah’s behavior just around the corner by the back pasture.
It was adding up to an image of coyote activity to us. We immediately checked Swings over for any evidence of confrontation beyond the chunk of missing tail. Nothing.
However, based on the evidence thus far, I decided to take Delilah back out and let her pursue through the trees whatever it was she sensed from before. That quickly led to another finding, uncomfortably in plain view of our house.
If you can discern what that image above is showing, you will notice an impression in the snow where an animal curled up and laid long enough to melt a little bowl, just like deer leave behind, except there were no hoof prints around. Only paw prints. And there wasn’t just the one melted circle. There were clearly two on top of the knoll and possibly two others, less defined, to the side in the trees.
That is definitely what Delilah had smelled, but the culprits had long since moved on before we passed by the first time in the early light of dawn.
Just to add an exclamation point to the drama, last night after dinner, I called Cyndie over to ask if she could hear something outside. Was it a siren in the distance or yipping coyotes? She opened the door and confirmed, “Coyotes!”
“And they are close!”
What do you think? Did a coyote take a chomp of Swings’ tail Wednesday night?
I hope at least one of them has a black eye from the impact of a hoof.
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Solar Anticipation
Days are getting longer to the point of noticeably changing for us, as the periods of time when we feed our horses in the morning and evening are again happening in the presence of the sun’s rays. Last night we received a fresh blanket of the lightest versions of snow, a direct reflection of the low temperature at the time. As the precipitation moved past us, the clear sky that resulted dropped the temperature even more.
This morning the horses showed great patience but also eager anticipation for the sunlight to reach our location.
The air was ripe with hope. It was as if I could feel the rotation of the earth that was slowly bringing our vantage point in line with direct sunlight.
When the sun became visible, I was ready to return to the shelter of our house where I could relax my defenses against the icy bite of the air and leave the horses to luxuriate in the climbing energy of solar rays.
As we enjoyed our breakfast in the loft, increasing sunshine provided assistance for the heat radiating from inside to start sliding the overnight snow off the skylight overhead.
It’s going to be a beautiful, sunny winter day.
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Relative Something 