Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

I got an email recently from Ann Bond, who handles a lot of public information for the public lands office based in Durango. Ann has close ties to our Spring Creek Basin horses and has even adopted a couple of burros through the BLM. She came up with some great questions while reading the blog and suggested I answer them on the blog.

“TJ – I had some questions while I was reading up on the ponies – how do they find enough to eat, what do they eat, how do they seem to handle the gnats, where do they get water, how do they handle the heat, etc.?”

What follows is from the email I sent back:

“The water is especially interesting lately – there’s not much of it. Recently, I’ve seen them drinking out of muddy hoofprints in nasty white-alkaline arroyos, from Wildcat Spring and from a ribbon of water in an arroyo (I’m not sure if that’s Spring Creek or if it’s a tributary) just down from a secret seep. Of the two water holes that have water, one is almost dry, and I’m not sure the horses are using it anymore anyway. Few of the horses are using the so-far-good water hole (Roach’s group and possibly Seven’s band). And the water’s on at the catchment, but none of the horses are up in that area (likely because of lack of grazing as well as memory of the tanks being empty).

“To be honest, I don’t know how they find enough to eat, but I talked to my mom this morning, and she commented on how fat the horses are. I sent her a pic of Houdini with her 2-plus-month-old filly, and Mom, a horsewoman, thought Iya was a yearling and Houdini was pregnant! Jif, Traveler’s dun mare that had been missing, showed up thin and limping, and Molly, the muley bay mare that had her foal almost a month ago, is thin – but (our BLM guy) said she was aged at 20+ by Cattoor, so that’s understandable. The others –
especially Luna! – are just downright fat. 🙂 Even the stallions – particularly Steeldust and Hollywood – have gained weight. They got pretty lean earlier in the spring when they were fending off the bachelors.

“As for what they eat – everything they can wrap their little lips around, I think! Luna eats practically all the time (she IS fat!), it seems. I’ve seen ’em nibbling on those kinda spiky-sagey plants (I’m not sure what the
plants are – it’s not sage; it has a kind of rubbery feel, and it’s taller/bigger than sage), and the sage – just about everything. The cheat grass is post-purple – nasty stuff. I hate it almost as much as I hate the gnats for sticking in my shoes and socks. Whatever they’re eating, it’s a good year. I hope the fat they’re putting on now carries them into August.

“They seem to handle the gnats better than I do, that’s for sure! They stamp and shake their heads, and their tails never quit swishing, it seem, but they’re fairly calm for how annoying it must be. The gnats do go away at night (around dark), but they’re back by about 8 a.m. Some seem more bothered than others. When I see Bones (the grey mare with Poco and Roach), it’s hard to get pix of her because it seems she never stops shaking her head. And they don’t seem at all bothered by the heat. They hang out in the open – I have seen the pinto family and some of Traveler’s under trees – and from recent observation, I think they go to water  pretty regularly – middle of the day and evening at least. I’m sure they also drink first thing in the morning.

“I’d love to go out there sometime with a botanist or someone who knows all those plants. I’ve learned some, but although I walk around through it all the time, my plant knowledge is embarrassingly limited.”

If anyone has any questions about the herd, I’ll certainly try to answer them. You should know that the more I learn about the wild horses, the more I realize how much more there is to learn.