Posts Tagged ‘horses’
Ice Out
When we arrived to feed the horses yesterday afternoon, I spotted Mia covered in soaking wet black slop. It appears she had just been swimming in Paddock Lake. The ice hadn’t even completely melted yet! Just two mornings ago, I spotted a couple of pigeons skating on the frozen surface.
Maybe the weight of the birds started cracking the ice up in advance of Mia’s arrival.
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On another topic, on Saturday night, Cyndie and I dipped our toes back into the real world by viewing a current live episode of SNL, despite knowing it would likely involve mention of he whom I wish to avoid at all times. Besides the cold open skit mocking the behaviors in the disrespectful meeting with President Zelenskyy, the Weekend Update news section included a short clip of the real meeting.
The only reason I am bringing this up is because I was alerted to a petition collecting signatures on an open letter of apology to the Ukrainian President expressing the embarrassment of American citizens for (my words:) [the actions of the weaklings who behave like schoolboy bullies]. If you are embarrassed as well, I invite you to join me and add your name to the tens of thousands of others who already have signed:
To President Zelenskyy, From Embarrassed Americans
I want nothing as much as I want to be recognized as an American who has no association whatsoever with the current (so-called) leaders of our country.
Heck, as long as I’m on the subject, I would like to apologize to Canada for anything and everything related to the same thuggish buffoons aforementioned.
It is a really great time to be on an expedition into the wilderness without constant contact with the real world.
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Bright Morning
The water line in the Ritchie fountain needed a brief shot of hot water to flow this morning, but that will probably be the end of our water worries for a few days. The temperature is climbing swiftly this morning, and we will be heading out to pull off horse blankets as soon as I finish this post. It is easy to see travel patterns now that we’ve had plenty of days without new snow.
Here is the difference between one time down a trail and a frequently used path:
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I’ve pointed out many times the icy patches in the large paddock that the horses avoid. Here is Mia soaking up the morning sun where you can see the horses cover a lot of the ground except for where they don’t:
That manure pile is my attempt to build a mound over the drain tile from the barn water spigot to keep them from squishing it. The water that drains from it creates that icy patch that the horses know to avoid.
This morning, I caught a shot of Mix’s grain mustache when she looked up from cleaning the spillage on Swing’s placemat.
It’s a pretty cheery day here in our oblivion, sequestered from any gloom or doom related to the evils of this world. It makes me feel a little guilty about how nice we have it. I don’t feel any guilt at all about making the horses’ world as blissful as possible for them.
For now, we are taking care of each other.
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Warming Up
We added a few more degrees for our daytime high temperature yesterday, and it is beginning to feel pleasant for an afternoon stroll. Before Asher and I stepped out for a sunny explore, I was looking in on the horses via the camera and finally spotted Light lying down for a deeper rest.
As soon as she laid down, Mia decided to join her. They didn’t stay down for long, but every little deep nap is beneficial.
All that high sunshine made quick work of cleaning up the pavement of our driveway.
Sunday is forecast to be the first of three days with temperatures above freezing, so I expect we will see more than just the pavement emerge from the meager blanket of snow cover that has accumulated so far this year.
Enough days have passed since the last snowfall that the traffic pattern of the horses is easier than ever to discern. It is also easy to see where wildlife is traveling on our land. These tracks move across our fence line like it isn’t even there.
I once watched a deer pass between the wires of our fence without slowing down, and it didn’t even cause the lines to vibrate. Even though I witnessed it happen, I don’t see how it is possible. I don’t recall whether we had the fence energized at the time or not, but if they don’t touch the wire, that’s not going to make a difference anyway.
I sure am glad I’m not trying to make a living off of winter snow activities. It’s going to feel like shirt-sleeve weather in a couple of days.
We are looking forward to not worrying about the waterer in the paddocks freezing up for a while. I will also appreciate the wetted grain not freezing to the bottom and sides of the feed buckets.
It’s going to feel like spring is coming, but I do not want to entertain false hope. The month of March has a reputation around here of frequently being the snowiest month. I will remain cautiously optimistic, yet I may also pump air into my bicycle tires just in case the riding season gets off to an early start.
Anything that puts -30°F wind-chill temperatures out of mind will be warmly welcomed. (See what I did there?)
[in Beavis or Butt Head voice] Heh heh. He said, “warmly.”
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Good Housekeeping
What day does your cleaning crew show up to clean around the barn? Ours arrived yesterday (in the form of me) and did a fantastic job sprucing up the horses’ living quarters. Even though the air temperature was only in the single digits (F) in the afternoon, it was twenty degrees warmer than when we showed up to feed the horses in the morning. The difference was enough to allow me to work comfortably without feeling like all of our survival was on the line.
I hunted down an ice scraper that worked wonders to knock the frozen pigeon poop off of the placemats. Before Cyndie arrived to serve the buckets of grain, I raked up all the scraps of hay that tend to collect in the corners and along the walls.
The horses are always wonderfully accommodating when I am moving amongst them to do my housekeeping tasks before we bring out their food. During the periods of extreme cold, I have also taken to showing up at their buckets when they get close to being finished to break up the portions that have frozen to the bottom, corners, and edges. They all seem to recognize the reason I am there, and they allow me to mess with the food in the few seconds when they lift their heads between bites.
All of my actions are intended to make their surroundings as nice as possible for them. They have all been through hard times, and we want the place we are providing to be the absolute opposite of whatever stresses they have previously experienced. They are living their retirement in a place that we hope in time will erase any residual tension they might still carry from the rough periods of their previous lives.
I don’t mean that to sound entirely altruistic because there is a selfish component to all this housekeeping as well. I prefer the way the place looks when it is clean. Even if they didn’t appreciate their accommodations being well-tended, I’d probably continue to tidy things up just for my sake.
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Coping Well
When it gets extremely cold with dangerously low wind chill temperatures, schools cancel classes and communities postpone events, but nobody cancels walking the dog or feeding the horses. Eighteen below zero Fahrenheit doesn’t keep us from donning our “space suits” to trudge out into the harsh conditions and carrying out our duties the same as every other day.
Asher needs to get out there to freshly mark his territory, and the horses need us to make sure they can get a drink of water and feed them grain and hay. Finding the water isn’t frozen in the morning is a huge plus in having things go smoothly for the early feeding. All four horses appear to be coping well with the biting cold, which also goes a long way toward allowing us to enjoy life here in the Arctic conditions.
While I was standing idle in the morning sunlight, waiting for the horses to finish their grains, I noticed some pigeons were on the waterer. They weren’t satisfied with simply getting a drink. One of them jumped in the water like it was its personal hot tub.
I have no idea how they avoid getting frozen when they step back out into the -18°F air. I would expect them to become pigeoncicles. They have been leaving a lot of pigeon-poopcicles on the horses’ placemats lately that are almost impossible to scrape off. I would say the pigeons seem to be coping with the cold better than all the rest of us.
We are starting to count the days until we can pull blankets off the horses to free them from that annoyance. As soon as overnight temps quit dropping below zero and daytime temps are hitting the 20sF, we will offer the horses some relief. The blankets are helpful during cold snaps or heavy snowfalls, but the horses would prefer not having them matting down the hair on their backs for days on end.
They have done a good job of coping with the necessary evil this week. I’d think they would appreciate having the blankets fluffed and recentered on their backs, but they tend to act non-cooperatively most of the times we try.
We just need to cope with getting a little push-back and reposition the blankets anyway. Having the blankets hanging off-center may not bug them, but it bugs the OCD tendencies in me when I see it.
That’s an area where my coping skills could use a little work.
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Never Simple
We hadn’t had a problem with the horse waterer in the paddocks freezing up on us again for enough days in a row that I stopped thinking about it. I still regularly glance toward it to see if there is liquid water in the pans, but I haven’t been lifting the cover to press the float and verify water flows. Temperatures were in the teens yesterday, but there was no direct sunshine.
During the afternoon feeding, I found the pans dry and immediately set about trying to warm the lines with my hands while Cyndie hustled back to the house to heat a kettle of water to pour over the tubing. It has worked simply enough to solve the problem each time it occurred the last times we’ve dealt with this. Of course, since it stopped happening, I didn’t pursue buying a new heat tape for that line. D’oh!
Since we weren’t prepared to be doing this, and our latest snowstorm was just getting underway, afternoon chores were suddenly getting complicated. While I was waiting at the waterer for Cyndie to return, Mia came down from her feed bucket looking to get a drink. It’s an awful feeling to disappoint a horse that just wants a drink of water.
When Cyndie popped out of the barn with the thermos, she was also bringing some water in a scoop she planned to use to clean the waterer. Mia stuck her snout in the scoop and guzzled what she could get out of it. I took the thermos, and Cyndie went in to fill another bucket with water for Mia. It didn’t take long at all for me to get the waterer flowing again.
If the horses keep drinking from it, the line is less likely to freeze at these relatively moderate temperatures simply because of the flowing water that refills it. If there is no flow, freezing occurs. We’ll be bringing hot water with us at the morning feeding.
Then I’ll start clearing snow. Just two days ago, I scraped the nuisance trace of snow off the pavement up by the house.
It’s all buried again now.
One more thing that’s not simple is the trick of prey surviving the threats of predators. We suspect that friendly pigeon we started calling “Plucky” may have fallen victim to a prowling cat or fox. There wasn’t a lot of evidence left, but the wing feathers were a dark color.
The predator got a meal for another day.
Life goes on. Cyndie and I are headed to a somewhat rare gathering of my Hays siblings today for an afternoon of catching up on each others’ stories. It’s my chance to tell them all the things I don’t write in this space.
Later tonight, I hope to take in a little sports spectating in the form of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off tournament game between the USA and Canada. Hockey rivalry much? I have a feeling this one won’t simply be just any old tournament hockey game, given the current state of government affairs.
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Gross Bug
Cyndie spotted a giant dead bug on the floor that looked so gross she went to get some paper towel to pick it up, wondering what the heck it was and where it had come from in the middle of winter.
Upon closer inspection, it was a shard of Velcro that Asher had chewed to bits. Since Asher likes to focus his toothy destruction on the Velcro of his Tearribles toys, we decided Cyndie could try sewing up a toy that is basically just Velcro seams for him to gnaw on. She has yet to test it on him.
I figure we will be seeing plenty more of these kinds of gross bugs lying around once Asher gets a chance to chew on this latest homemade dog toy experiment.
Maybe we will give it to him next week in celebration of his 3rd birthday.
Speaking of birthdays, yesterday was Mia’s actual birthday. I think I’ve written before that Thoroughbreds all have their ages incremented on January 1st each year to simplify grouping the horses for racing. As of the first of the year, Mia turned 25, but the actual day of her birth is February 13. One of the volunteers from This Old Horse, who has developed a special fondness for Mia, stopped by yesterday with a treat for her: a mixture of some sweet feed, carrots, and peppermint.
The other three horses all got a token serving of carrots to munch.
Happy February Birthdays to Mia and Asher!
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Unwarranted Optimism
Overnight Friday, into Saturday, we received a plowable amount of snow. Somewhere between 4-5 inches when it ended on Saturday afternoon. During a walk with Asher on Sunday, I was surprised to discover the snowmobile club had run a groomer along their trail that passes over a corner of our property.
One benefit of having almost no snow the last two winters is that we have enjoyed the absence of the annoying whine of dozens of snow machines racing past our land every hour.
I wondered if the grooming of the paltry amount of snow on the trail meant we would be seeing sleds zooming back and forth again soon. Then I looked across the road where the trail continues over a neighboring field.
Unlikely. There wasn’t enough snow over the cultivated dirt to create a reasonable base. As much as the club members must be longing to get out and play on their snowmobiles, that trail just isn’t ready. I think that grooming the measly snow cover was overly optimistic.
We’ve entered another span of below-zero overnight temperatures that led us to putting blankets back on the horses yesterday. I think they understood the situation and were very accommodating when we busied ourselves around and underneath them to hook latches and thread buckles.
A couple of nights ago, we had the surveillance camera display on the bedroom TV, looking at the horses under the overhang for the sheer joy of being able to watch them. We witnessed Light falling asleep standing up and not locking her knees. It surprised me that the first jolt she experienced didn’t wake her, and she drooped her head right away again and tilted forward so far we thought she would fall on her face. It looked to me like she might have scraped her knees before recovering to her hooves again.
Cyndie did a little research and found instances where nerve damage might make it difficult for a horse to engage the “stay apparatus” mechanism that allows them to relax their muscles and enter a light sleep while standing. We have long suspected that Light may have had her front legs restrained (hobbled) at some time in her life, which could have resulted in long-term issues that seem consistent with the difficulties we’ve witnessed.
Maybe she isn’t getting enough deep sleep sessions while lying down during this period when she is looking to claim the role of overall herd leader.
At first glance in the photo above, it looks like there are just two horses.
Zooming in reveals Mix and Swings doing some deep-sleep napping on their sides.
After consulting with our rep from This Old Horse, we’ve started giving Light some pain relief medication to see if discomfort might be interfering with a healthy sleep routine. I will be paying closer attention to their activity to watch for Light getting a turn for some REM sleep while lying on her side.
Except for the hours when I’m busy catching my own ZZZZs.
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Asserting Myself
It is rare that I feel a need to get aggressive with the horses. Yesterday morning was one of those rare moments. To do this story justice, a little background should be understood, so please bear with me as I prepare the scene.
First off, the wooden fenced area we refer to as the paddocks can be split in two by closing gates. Two of our horses get a larger serving of grain than the others, so we pair them up with Mix and Mia on the small paddock side of the barn overhang and Light and Swings on the large side.
They understand the routine well enough that if they aren’t already in the designated positions when we emerge from the barn with feed buckets, they usually adjust in short order. Up at the overhang, there is a short alleyway between the two paddocks that is passable most of the time. When they are in position to be served grain, we swing two gates 90 degrees to block the alleyway.
Since we will be moving in and out of each side multiple times, usually with our hands occupied, it helps if we don’t need to secure the gates with chains each time. To solve that, we conveniently park the wheelbarrow across the alleyway between the two gates so the horses can’t cross, but we can step our skinny little selves around the gates with minimal difficulty.
Mix and Light in a rare moment of sharing a hay net as if they were BFFs. Whaaat!? Not usually.
I’m usually busy filling the wheelbarrow with manure at this point while Cyndie is serving feed buckets and filling hay nets.
Are you with me so far?
One more thing: each paddock has a gate to the hay field that we leave open. If they want to, the horses can get to the other side when we have the alleyway blocked by walking down past the waterer, out one gate and in the other to disturb the horses eating on the other side. It’s not usually an issue these days because they tend to remain occupied with their own buckets, and walking all the way around isn’t really worth the effort.
It all works like a charm until the horses decide they have a different agenda.
I’ve been on my own for a week, and the horses are well aware of my routine. They’ve been patient with my being able to only do one thing at a time. When I popped out of the barn for the first time, they were all in the right spots for feeding, so I closed the alleyway, cleaned off their placemats, and went inside to prepare the buckets of grain.
When I emerged again, Light and Swings had taken that long trek down and around to now be standing on the wrong side and in the way of Mix and Mia. A power move, for sure, but I was not going to help them at all. I served their grain buckets in the regular spots and left Mix and Mia’s on the ground by the door. All the four horses could do was stare at the grain in frustration.
Light and Swings didn’t take the hint and stood their ground defiantly, so I just busied myself sprucing up their side and filling their hay nets while horses fussed. I was not about to re-open that alleyway for them. They chose to go down and around; I felt they should go back the way they came if they wanted to eat.
When I ran out of things to do, I decided to help them understand what we were all waiting for. I stepped around the gate and energetically pushed them to get the heck out of there and go around. All four horses got riled up at this dance, but it was very easy for Mix and Mia to see that they were not at fault as my attention remained solely on the other two.
It took a couple of loops down around the dying willow and back up before Swings and Light figured out they could get away from my pressure by going through the gate I was directing them toward. As soon as they did, I served Mix and Mia their buckets, and in a blink, everyone was calm and back to grazing.
I think I successfully made my point. For the record, no shenanigans occurred at the evening feeding. ‘Nuff said.
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Watchful Eyes
Saturday was a cold day that froze water in one of our electric water buckets that failed. Then, in the afternoon, what I can only describe as an angry wind showed up and made it feel like we were under attack. Debris was peppering the walls of the barn, and I struggled to push the door open against the pressure. The wetted grain in the horses’ feed buckets froze to the bottom. It was miserable.
Sunday, I was shocked to find the temperature had warmed considerably, and it was calm enough that fog was forming. It was very pleasant compared to the night before. The relative warmth of the day inspired me to nibble away at the dying willow tree now that I was feeling more inspired about the possibilities for a shade canopy in its place, thanks to feedback from a couple of people who read my post yesterday morning.
I was reminded that I don’t have to do everything at once, so I grabbed a rake and started pulling down dead branches that were hung up in a tangle with all the others. Mix came over to see if I needed any help.
I tried picking up branches as they fell and started tossing them just outside the nearest gate. It didn’t take long for Light to wander over and conduct an inspection of whatever the heck I was trying to accomplish.
That initial progress was so easy that I decided to return after lunch with a pole saw. Heck, the temperature had climbed above freezing, and the sun was making intermittent appearances. Since I was hoping to bring down some larger limbs, I closed a couple of gates to keep the horses out of the small paddock. The only thing that Swings could do at that point was stand and stare from the other side of the fence.
I got the impression she was not entirely pleased to see me dismantling their favorite old shade tree. Mia can be seen in the background of that picture, showing no interest whatsoever in my antics.
I went as far as I could with a handsaw. My pole chainsaw will be part of the next phase, but I need to wait until Cyndie is home since we have a rule against using chainsaws when no one else is around.
How about a side-by-side comparison of my progress?
Saturday before pruning
Sunday after pruning
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Before I can do more pruning, I have a pile of branches that needs to be cleared away.
That’s always the least glamorous part of cutting down branches and tends to tarnish the good vibes achieved in the first part of the job. Since I’ve given myself permission to not try to do the whole job of removing the tree all at once, today, I plan to just focus on hauling branches to make that pile disappear.
Cyndie is expected home tomorrow, so if I can clean it all up today, I can see if she notices the difference in the tree. That is, if the horses don’t point it out to her first.
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Relative Something 