Posts Tagged ‘horses’
Harsh Realities
In the last few days, we have come across a surprising number of animal parts that Delilah has collected from her explorations around our property. I think the melting snow might be revealing some carcasses that were preserved beneath all the white stuff this winter. At least, we hope that explains the dramatic increase in our exposure to the harsh reality of animal mortality lately, as opposed to the possibility that she has become that proficient of a predator.
Cyndie buys a lot of chew toys for our dog, but none of those come close to thrilling Delilah as much as something biological. Oftentimes, we are unable to recognize what she has in her mouth, but it is easy to tell from her behavior and body language that it isn’t one of the toys.
If we are lucky, we are unable to identify what it is. Somehow that is easier to stomach. I felt a bit nauseous yesterday as she chomped away on the very obvious body of a mouse. Then she comes inside and tries to lick our faces with her bad breath while we towel her dry and remove her blaze-orange vest.
Earlier that morning, Cyndie stepped in the house from feeding the horses and said, “I have a blog post title for you…”
“Headless Rabbit.”
I decided not. Cyndie described the unlikely scenario of lifting one of the horse’s feed pans which had been flipped upside down in the paddock, and discovering the carcass of a headless rabbit beneath. We can’t imagine how it ended up there. Maybe one of the horses came across the body and purposely covered it out of respect.
We also have a pile of feathers that Delilah has been working on, which I’m guessing came from one of the many wild turkeys roaming our land. In addition to the deer leg that has been a recent prize, she also is quite fond of chewing on a fair-sized piece of hide; both hoof and hide being something that a pack of coyotes might leave behind.
Another harsh reality we are facing this weekend, with temperatures soaring well-above freezing, is the mud and manure mess we have been anticipating in the paddocks. When the ground here is saturated, it becomes so soft that you sink to the point of losing a boot in many places. That means we don’t dare try driving the tractor into the paddocks now to remove the abundant accumulation of manure. It would sink past the axles. This will be a nasty problem to endure while waiting for the soil to dry out.
It is our first spring with the horses, and this worst-case scenario has us biding our time until we can engineer a remedy, which will likely be a combination of altering landscape to improve drainage, and adding some sand/gravel to a few key areas to improve their footing.
All this “reality” certainly does help to accentuate how far we have come in our move from the refined environment of our previous life in the suburbs.
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Topsy Turvy
I don’t know what it is, spring weather, phase of the moon, tax return preparation, college basketball tournament upsets, or blog hosting sites putting their users through unwanted drama, but things seem a bit chaotic around here recently. It doesn’t help that I am once again on leave from the day-job due to another slowdown in business. Then, there are things like the commercial airplane disappearance, the massive mud slide, Chicago’s commuter train crash, and our dog and cats getting the throw-ups. At least the horses are fine, well… except we received a classic spring rain/snow mix that got them chilled and wet yesterday, so that we needed to move them into the barn for the night.
I captured this picture of one of Delilah’s toys recently, and when I opened it up for viewing on my computer screen, it immediately caused me to think, “That’s exactly what I feel like.”
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New Hay!
Of the many blessings we have experienced in the time since we first learned about this place we now call home, the ones that involve our animals seem to have a special preciousness for us. Our horses have been with us for less than half a year, and every success we achieve in caring for them brings a welcome sense of relief, since we are pretty much figuring everything out for the very first time. Managing the hay to keep them properly fed has been one of our primary lessons.
Back in September, as complete novices in all things hay related, we didn’t have a clue about what we were looking for in a bale. Even after learning a few things, we are still humbled to discover that even “good” hay can develop some mold, or contain sections with undesirable contents. The bales we acquired from two different sources, and have been feeding to our horses all winter, turned out to have some of both problems.
A month ago, I wrote about the discovery that we had too much foxtail grass in some of our hay, which was giving the horses mouth sores. We ended up losing many large bales from our stash due to that problem. Our struggle with finding mold inside other bales has been consistent, showing up in hay from both providers. We eventually deduced that some of the hay we purchased from the unfamiliar supplier must have been what is called, “ditch hay.” The grass in the bales proved to be dusty, like grass beside a gravel road is dusty, and included bits of plastic refuse and many large sticks. 
The dustiness is not appealing to the horse’s keen sense of smell, and it confounds our efforts of identifying whether we are seeing clouds from mold spores, or not.
Recently, a reliable source surprised us with the wonderful news that they had some small bales they could make available. Their message was a blessing that couldn’t have come at a better time. Yesterday, to make room for the new bales, Cyndie and I removed the pile of moldy hay that has been tossed aside.
Within minutes of Jack and Joanie pulling into our driveway, we felt the thrill of connecting with good-hearted people and sensed the hay would be ideal for our horses. In our bliss over having good quality hay, we neglected to think ahead about how we stacked it. Chatting while we worked, Jack tossed bales almost faster than we could stack them, I tried to think about fitting the bales into the smallest space possible, and Cyndie placed them at every which-way orientation. Later in the evening, I asked Cyndie if she counted the bales.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
What that reveals is that neither she nor I felt any concern about trusting the quantity delivered. Unfortunately, our lack of concern about counting bales relates to our not having a logical pattern to the way we stacked them, which means we will never actually know how many bales remain on hand after we’ve used a bunch. Another lesson learned.
Happily, the horses seemed as thrilled with the new hay as us. I captured Dezirea and Legacy breathing in the delicious smell, while Hunter and Cayenne wasted no time in chomping away.
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Spring Arrives
Today is the first day of spring on the calendar, so that means only a few weeks, or maybe a month, more of days when we might experience significant snow events. Yesterdays’ little excitement is already melting fast. I did need to plow the driveway when I got home from work, but it was relatively easy and the remnants left behind on the pavement melted quickly, leaving the driveway mostly clean after minimal effort.
Unfortunately, I was doing some cleanup with a shovel and leaned into it, sliding the snow to the edge, when a disc in my back went kablooey. It’s impressive how quickly a person can go from standing upright, to flat on their back on the mucky wet ground. It’s also interesting how blissful it can seem to be laying down with no pain, regardless the fact it was on the wet pavement. I was feeling content to lay there for the rest of the night, but Cyndie happened along and inspired me to make my way back to my feet again with the enticement of Chinese takeout she brought home for dinner.
Today is not a day for whining, it’s spring! I’ll celebrate with a shot of Cayenne posing in the bright March sunshine. Green things won’t be far behind.
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Nature’s Course
There is no getting around the fact that we are at that time of year when the weather can flip from enticingly spring-like to “as winter as ever” in a single day. It can be a tough blow at the end of a harsh winter to be walloped by storms that give the impression the weather is headed in the wrong direction. Today is expected to be one of those tough blows, but it is not clear what the precise position of the storm will be. We are on the edge of a suspected path which could swing either to freezing rain or heavy, wet snow.
For the time being, I’m going to enjoy this image of our paddock from Saturday, when the snow had been cleared off the ground and the clouds were gone from the sky. We’ll have more of this type of enjoyment in the days ahead. We just need to tolerate a small setback to a winter storm for a few days.
That’s Dezirea munching hay, with Legacy standing by, on watch.
A couple of days later and it looked like this (although, in fairness, this one was taken with my phone looking through a dirty window from inside our sunroom):
At Delilah’s desperate urging, I let her outside to chase a squirrel, or squirrels, which had been tugging mercilessly at her predator instincts while she was trapped indoors. I followed her with my eyes as she sprinted deep into the neighbor’s woods to our north, much farther than she normally explores. The unconscious chase left her in new territory, and I would have been surprised if she just turned around and came back into our yard.
She disappeared for quite a while. When Delilah finally reappeared outside our windows, it wasn’t a squirrel she had as a prize, but the bottom portion of a deer leg. It is most likely that she happened upon a carcass that was left by some other predator(s), but she looked so much like a wolf out there, gnawing on that limb in the heavy falling snow, I felt a renewed appreciation for why our cats appear so wary of her.
She’s just doing what comes natural, but it can be almost scary seeing how incredibly proficient she is about it.
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Building Bonds
With the paddocks recently freshened up —can’t refer to them as clean, since the horses have already followed up Saturday’s major effort with a hefty new distribution of piles— we invited Cyndie’s niece and nephews to come inside the fence to brush the horses. It was a good chance to allow the 1000 pound animals to bond with the kids and receive the nurturing care being offered.
Hunter, in the foreground of the image at left, and Cayenne, far in the distance, were wonderfully cooperative. Legacy, hidden from view, was less so. He wasn’t on his best behavior.
I’m told that horses don’t hold a grudge, but I saw how frustrated he was with us Saturday when we locked the horses out of the paddock while we worked to clean it. I wouldn’t blame him if he was still miffed. While I was scraping manure with the New Holland, he was at the gate, huffing and snorting, scratching away at the ground with his hoof, and shaking his head to and fro. He definitely wanted back in. Cyndie said that when I was putting away the tractor and she opened the gate to let them back in, they didn’t rush in with glee, but casually sauntered in as if it was no big deal. I returned from the garage to report that we had worked an hour-and-a-half past their usual afternoon feeding time. Maybe that was what Legacy had gotten all worked up about. It was past the appointed hour for dinner and we were showing no signs of doing anything about it.
Yesterday’s temperatures had plummeted down to a solid freeze again, so when I stepped out in the morning to get a picture of the new manure pile we had created in the paddock, I was able to walk on top of the crust of snow without breaking through. I decided to hike out and up the hill into the big field, where the snow cover has receded enough to reveal areas of exposed ground. I was curious as to whether this would attract the horses or not. They have barely stepped in the big field ever since the last big snow accumulation. It had gotten too deep to make it worth the effort for them. I expect the horses would feel an increased vulnerability in deep snow.
There was one little trail the horses had trampled into the field, and that single route was what they now confined themselves to on the few occasions they did wander out. While I was taking some pictures from up on that hill, with the sun behind me, Hunter ventured up that trail, stopping where the path began to arc away to his right. Wondering if he was interested in coming further, I approached him with an invitation to join me.
Tentatively, he stepped onto the crusty snow beyond the packed path. Hunter isn’t light enough to stay on top like me, but he found it was no longer too deep, and carefully proceeded in my direction. In the distance, Legacy was keeping a keen eye on the scene.
While Hunter wandered around on the hill with me, checking the spots where the snow had melted away, Legacy and the other horses moved out to just beyond the paddock, but no further. I think they didn’t want to deal with the crunchy terrain, yet they were obviously interested in what Hunter was up to.
He was with me, and we were alone —make that, alone with Delilah— up on the hill. It was pretty special. Unfortunately, since I wasn’t grazing, my interest quickly waned, and I was soon ready to head back down. It didn’t feel right to just walk away and leave Hunter alone, so I tried to let him know my intention to go, slowly stepping down toward the paddock. In seconds, Hunter was following. In fact, he started to increase his gate and I needed to hustle along to avoid getting run over. I wasn’t sure if his rush was to make it easier for him to navigate the crusty snow, or if he was just that eager to get back with the herd, but his sudden haste took nothing away from the sweet experience we had shared in his choosing to join me up there.
It seems as though Hunter and I are building a special bond of our own.
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Many Firsts
In our new world of country living on 20 acres with horses, cats, and a dog, 2 tractors, an ATV, a spare pickup truck, plus 3 outbuildings, we frequently find ourselves facing tasks with which we have no previous experience. Yesterday’s ‘first’ was using the diesel tractor to clean manure in the paddocks.
Our horses arrived at the end of September last year, so this has been our first winter with them. After the fall season in which we tried to clean the paddocks almost daily, the winter weather introduced a whole new challenge to our system. The snow covers and freezes the daily accumulations and we pretty much stopped trying to do any cleaning at all.
I asked our neighbor, George, how they deal with the situation at their farm. He stated matter of factly that they just wait until the snow melts and then scoop out the entire top layer of soil and manure. I fear ours will be a muddy mess that will keep our machines out of there until summer, so I was weary of how simple he made it sound.
Last week, while out shopping for hay nearby, we drove from the east on the county road that passes just south of our place. It was the very first time I have traveled that stretch of road since we moved here. We had yet to see the view of our place from that direction in the year-and-a-half we have been here.
While we were out on that trip, we noticed a farm where they piled the manure right inside their paddock. With all our snow finally melting, the months of manure are getting revealed in our paddocks, so I suggested we consider doing the same. The mess in our paddocks is big enough that I figured we would need to use the tractor, but I was unsure about whether I could successfully navigate the challenging terrain. The driveway was melting and would be a mud pit. The snow was still deep in some areas and the wheels of the tractor might not get me through. The ice could leave me spinning in place.
While surveying the situation, Cyndie spent precious time brushing out the shedding coat of each horse. I tried raking some manure by hand, and quickly learned it was still too frozen to be very effective with that mode. It would definitely take the power of the tractor to make any measurable progress.
In hindsight, I think we picked the perfect day for this task because it was a day when the temperature stayed below freezing. The tractor was able to make good progress in scraping the top layer of accumulated manure, and in so doing removed a lot of snow. If we had tried this on a day when it was warmer it would have been a muddy mess.
We ended up with a giant pile in one corner, but that should shrink significantly when the snow portion melts away. I think we did pretty well with our first try at using the tractor to clean the paddock. It was, in fact, one of the primary reasons we anticipated needing that tractor in the first place.
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Drippy Day
Sunshine had the snow melting off our rooftops in dramatic fashion yesterday. I started a project to assemble a new trailer for our ATV outside of the shop garage, but partway through, I noticed that the snow overhanging the roof had gotten so large it looked scary.
I moved further away from the overhang, out of harms way. At the time, the whole front section of the driveway was dry, but about midway through the assembly instructions my work space was becoming a series of draining water paths.
There weren’t as many collapses from overhead as I expected, but the afternoon was peppered with just enough dislodged masses of melting snow to keep me on edge.
In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Delilah and the horses, I can report that Cyndie came in after feeding them in the morning, shortly after I had hit the “Publish” button, and she told me that somehow one of the horses sent the dog tumbling a couple of rolls through the snow.
She said Delilah got up with just a hint of a limp and carried on, leaving a bit more space between herself and the horses.
The horses were wary in the afternoon about coming up to feed under the overhang, so I suspect they have been enduring their own share of startling crashes of snow melt.
Everybody is a little out of whack around here. The cats are acting strange, but in a good way, making many more demands for attention than usual. I think they are starting to shed, and just want us to give them a good brushing. I was petting Pequenita and ended up with my hand and shirt covered in statically clinging cat hair.
I noticed the wee cat smelling Delilah’s paws just after the dog walked in the door from outside. Our cats don’t get to go outside, and I think she was curious about the scent from the great beyond.
Right now, that scent probably just smells like wet feet, but if the melt keeps up like this for long, very soon those paws will be smelling like spring mud.
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Spring Things
For the first time in months, I finally got my car washed yesterday. The once shiny blue car was an ugly gray mess of accumulated salty road spray. The temperature didn’t get above freezing yesterday, but it was sunny enough for the March sunshine to be effective at making it feel warmer than it really was. The line at the car wash was long and the wait was even longer, but it felt worth the pause to get it taken care of before the next blast of precipitation starts the accumulation all over again.
There is a real sense of impending change lingering in the air around our place now that the daily low temperature readings are no longer negative numbers and the high temperatures are headed above freezing for a couple of days. The higher sun angle and the later sunset hour are probably contributing the most to the feelings of transition that are upon us.
The horses are already showing signs of shedding their winter growth. Delilah seems to have more energy than ever. Unfortunately, she has started a pattern of barking at the sound of a neighbor’s dog 10-acres distant who sits in a kennel and “shouts” a lot. I’m grateful that Delilah has chosen to just sit on our hill and bark back at the dog, as opposed to run off in search of it.
We think Mozyr has resumed his misbehavior of peeing where he shouldn’t. The other night, he did it on our bed while we were right there, distracted by a video Cyndie had leaned forward to view on my computer. When she leaned back, her hand discovered the wet spot. What the heck!? Now I keep thinking I’m smelling urine in the air in several places, but I can never sniff out a location on surfaces. Even though I almost don’t want to see the truth, we are going to get one of the UV lights that will illuminate the spots where the cats have peed. Obviously, it is important for us to know, but at the same time, I really don’t want to discover what I expect will be the vast number of incidents.
I stopped by the hardware store on the way home yesterday to see if my lawn mower blades had been sharpened and ready for pickup. They weren’t, waylaid by the onslaught of problem snowblowers that had been brought in after the last mega-snowfall. I thought I was being smart to get my blades taken care of during the off-season, when they wouldn’t be inundated with lawnmowers needing similar attention, but it’s only logical that there isn’t really an “off-season” at a hardware store. At least I got them in at a time when I won’t be needing them if the wait takes longer than I expected.
This coming weekend, we move the clocks ahead one hour for the start of Daylight Saving Time, and in two weeks from today the vernal equinox arrives. Spring is here! That means only about two and half months left when we are at risk of getting bombed by a monster snow storm. Isn’t that encouraging!
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Relative Something 