It is with a shattered heart that I report that Dundee’s big, handsome dun colt, Ranger, shown above with his aunties, Aiyanna and Rowan, has disappeared. It’s so hard to bear the unfairness and suddenness of it that it doesn’t even seem real. Dundee was a fiercely protective new mother and did everything right in all the times I saw them together. … It’s a reminder that our beloved wild ones ARE wild and that life is not guaranteed.
Fly free, Ranger. You were so loved.
Kestrel gives me an eyeball while she searches for fresh, yummy, actual grass around the bases of the green greasewood on a bench just above one of Spring Creek Basin’s main arroyos. The horses definitely eat the greasewood, but at this particular time while I was with them, they were all about that grass, which was a few inches tall where sheltered by the woody stems of the greasewood. It must have been satisfying for *them* to eat … *listening* to them snip the bunches of grass with their teeth and chew was incredibly satisfying for *me*! 🙂
It’s worth noting that this is also a season for “bling.” As the horses forage among the greasewood, bits of the branches get tangled in manes and forelocks. You can see a bit in Kestrel’s mane already.
Looking at Sundance in the opposite direction from the pic I posted of him recently. Wonderfully stormy sky, which we haven’t seen for a few days and would very much like to see again!
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Happy, happy May Day birthday to my brother, Jeff! 🙂
Skywalker and his pal, Sancho, have a chat over – what else? – a girl. She wasn’t nearly as interested in them (helped along by her stallion) as they were in her.
Love. Even when hearts break, they are there to knit those tissues back together. Without them, there is nothing. With them, everything.
Somebody (Winona) was in a hurry to get to Spring Creek to drink because, yes, dear readers, there’s water trickling through stretches of the Spring Creek arroyo in Spring Creek Basin.
Some stretches, you ask? Some stretches are damp, some are downright dry, and some have water trickling through runnels through the middle of the bed of the arroyo. It’s wild how the water runs *under* the bed of the arroyo … because otherwise, where does it come from *downstream* of those dry stretches?
Even with ponds offering walk-in-able water, it’s interesting how the horses drink from all their available water sources.
Mustangs. 🙂 They know how to drink!
The ponies still have some fuzz, but that’s starting to change.
Juniper: Mother Nature’s shedding tool. Looks like somebody had a nice bit of a rub.
This photo of Tenaz does a better job of illustrating the windy conditions than it does convincing viewers that the greyer-than-usual haze in the background is SNOW and not just our usual Mancos shale ridge slopes. …
But it is.
Snow, that is.
Happy late April, almost May?! 🙂 Welcome to Colorado!
We know we’re blessed. 🙂
The weather has been unsettled the last few days, which bodes well for our getting some much-needed moisture in a day or two. It seems wild that after a good winter, we should need that moisture, but those spring winds dry things out, and we haven’t gotten much new moisture in the form of rain (or snow) lately.
Those fast-moving clouds and changing light conditions can make for some dramatic lighting, and Sundance was happy (!) to pose! Ha – that’s not true; he was busy chasing green bits! In the pic above, I happened to catch him as he was looking across a little drainage at his band. Chew, chew … and back to grazing. 🙂 What a guy!
