Spring Creek Basin isn’t large (though it can seem so). Mostly, I see all but the most elusive mustangs fairly regularly. But when I don’t see the regulars in places where I’m used to seeing them, a change of location – looking and going – is a must.
Which led to my first visit with Buckeye’s band (and Rowan, pictured) this week since I returned from my Thanksgiving getaway.
Happy. 🙂
The pintos do the BEST job of showing off their winter fuzzies. Thanks, Chipeta. 🙂
Winona gave me just a minute or so in that soft light before she dropped out of sight with her band. I walked out to them, but they were low, which didn’t allow the highlighting of the very lovely light on the basin’s icons to the east. So I left them to their grazing and trudged back up the still-very-muddy hill … with a bit more of a spring in my step.
Happy birthday to my dad, the best man I know. I’m grateful to have grown up his daughter, raised with horses even as we moved around the country and the world and shared him with Uncle Sam.
He’s still busily ranching with my mom, waiting out the severe Texas drought with horrible heat and no rain in sight, taking care of cows and horses.
Thanks, Dad, and happy birthday! I love you!
No surprise that Kestrel is the gold at the end of this rainbow!
Not to mention neverending tail flips.
If any mustang knows better than Sundance (or at least as well!) how to find the best scenery in Spring Creek Basin, it’s Storm.
This handsome boy and his band have been very elusive most of the winter, and this day was almost no different. According to my GPS, I hiked nearly six miles in my quest to visit him and his family; they were so far beyond the back of beyond, it may as well have been *behind* the back of beyond!
Or maybe, it’s really the front door to the best place on Earth. 🙂
Who are we to argue?!
Buckeye and his girls aren’t too bothered by outside influences. … Until, several minutes after I took this pic, they noticed the resident pronghorn group, browsing into and out of an arroyo down the slope from our location. THAT got their attention. I never would have noticed them except for the ponies’ sharp eyes. ‘Course, I usually have eyes only for the mustangs. 🙂
While we were working on the catchment last week, Mike and Garth found this little critter wandering around the work site. Garth took some pix of it crawling up Mike’s arm, and Daniel took some pix for his wife, who hates spiders (!), then I followed suit. The tarantula crawled up to Mike’s shoulder and around behind his neck to his other shoulder, where I lifted it gently and, at Mike’s direction, carried it safely away from where we were working.
Because our herd manager is just a big softie … for creatures great and small. 🙂
Only a couple of days earlier, I’d rescued another tarantula from being stepped on by a grazing horse moving in its direction (the horse definitely was aware of the little eight-legged crawler).
I don’t see as many tarantulas lately as the temperatures drop, but there are still some wandering about the countryside. Gotta protect these little guys and gals!
The cool, clear gaze of a mustang conveys such knowledge as humans may once have had and most have lost … a deep understanding of the world and their place in it. We should be so wise!
Spring Creek Basin Mustangs 