Hey! Strings!

 Now there is cold white stuff all over the ground.  A couple of weeks ago a LOT of that white stuff fell out of the sky and we could hardly walk around.  I mean really.  It was up to our bellies.  We had to send the taller ponies along the trails ahead of us just so we could get through.  But then it got warmer and there was water everywhere.  So now there is just a little bit of white stuff but it is hard to find nice grass so the lady has to bring us dried grass that she calls Hey!  It is the same thing that she yells when I pin my ears back and swing my butt toward my sisters.  The Hey! is tied up into squares with strings.  The Hey! we get now has blue strings.  I mean really bright blue strings.  Like Mediterranean waters off the coast of Sardinia blue.  So the other day the lady was throwing Hey! to the ponies in the three board fence pasture and she decided to hang the strings on the fence.  She usually collects the strings and puts them in feed bags under the delusion that she is going to find a use for them someday.  But she looped the strings around the top board and left the ends hanging down like a fringe.  She had this idea that if she put the strings on the fence every day, by the end of the Hey! throwing season, the whole fence would have long fancy blue fringe hanging on it all the way back to the pond.  So she did that for a couple of days, but today when she got to the fence there were no blue strings.  The strings were all lying in the pony pasture and they were dirty and trampled and chewed on.  Apparently those ponies were not interested in a freeform blue string art formation.  (One of the ponies tried to say that Auntie Fah had pulled the strings down, but the lady didn't buy it because there is no one on the farm named Fah.)  So she picked up all the strings before they got frozen in the mud and became pony trip hazards.     

Fluorescent orange

 Yesterday, after the lady gave Marco and his band some square dried grass, she and the big dog walked across the pony pasture that is next to Marco's.  There are no ponies allowed in that pasture now because of the man that put the steps against the tree in the neighboring field.  The lady didn't see the man who wants to be a squirrel in the tree until they got half way across the pasture.   The lady and the big dog walked along the fence line down to where the riding trail starts in the woods.  When they got to the trail, a bunch of  deers turned and went running back into the woods.  They were waving their white tails and making that snorting noise like deers do.  The big dog was excited to see them, but he was attached to the lady with a lead line, so he couldn't run off or anything.  The lady and the big dog had only gone about two pony lengths on the trail when the squirrel man went Kaboom! and the big dog jumped. They stopped.  There had been no deers in the field in front of the squirrel man.   So then they turned around and came back to the pasture and walked over to check on us Outback ponies.  Today, the lady is wearing a jacket that matches the big orange machine that carries her around sometimes.         

Big Bang Season

 It is noisy..  There are big bangs around, but we are not sure where they are coming from.  Some trucks came into the field by our woods and the people got out and looked at the trees   I guess they wanted to climb into the trees like the squirrels do, because they put some steps up by one of trees and climbed up and sat there. Then they came back down and drove away, but they left the steps there.  Our lady walked over to the fence that runs along the woods and discovered that there was a big hole where the pointy wire used to be.  So she put the pointy wire back up.  Then she got some of that wide white tape that bites if you touch it and hung that along the wire fence. She has been taking down and putting that fence tape up everywhere. Some of it is white and some is black and some is wide and some is skinny and some looks like rope, but it will all bite you if you  rub up against it.    A while ago, she took down the tape at the end of our pasture and we could go into the grassy field that is next to it.  In past years, the lady would drive machines around in the field when the weather was warm and cut it short and then make the grass into boxes that were tied up and she would bring us the boxes when there was no more grass growing.   This year, she didn't cut the grass, so when we went into the field, there was a lot of tall dead grass.  There is short green grass too, but it is down there, under the tall grass, so you have to sort through it.  It's not like you can just rush out there and shove grass in your mouth, so that was a bit of a disappointment.   Plus, the field next to ours looked REALLY green because other ponies were eating out there.  Then yesterday, the lady came out and  yelled at us so we ran up really fast to see what was going on and she showed us that we can walk into another part that has a lot more green grass.  THAT was very exciting.  A couple of times we had to run back out of there because there were loud bangs that startled us and the bunch of ponies that are eating grass by the barns. But the grass there is nice, so we went back in after no one was hurt.   I was trying to keep my sister DD from eating grass in there with us, but she kept sneaking back in when I was distracted.  Her real name is Derby Day because she was foaled on a day that a bunch of big horses that have nothing to do with us ran around in a circle far away, but we call her DD for short.  She looks almost exactly like our younger sister Elfe.  But I don't have a problem with Elfe.  We ate a lot of the nice grass and then my big sister Gypsy said we had to go check out other parts of our fields, so now we can't get back in there until tomorrow.   The lady says we don't know that pasture well enough yet to be out there at night.  I do know that there is a tall white neighbor bird that lives in a pen next to the creek.  The bird was surprised to see us and made all kinds of really funny noises at us.  Kind of like the big brown birds that walk around in the woods, but different.  The lady says that bird might not be there tomorrow.  

Bird updates

So a couple of days ago I wrote about the tiny cats.  The tiny cats are still there in the barn in the hay bale cave. They have their little eyes open, but they aren't running around or anything.  There are other things around here that are reproducing as well and the most prominent are the geese.   The geese are brown and white with black heads and very noisy.  They are messy and eat our grass.  The geese hang out by the pond and run around in the muddy areas of our pastures and the streams and are always honking and hissing and flapping.  The geese all leave when the ground turns white and come back when it starts to get warmer.  A long time ago, there was just one pair of geese, but then they had babies and every year there are more and more geese.  This year there were four couples who had a bunch of goslings a few weeks ago and now those little geese are already half-grown fuzzy geese.  Then another pair of geese showed up with a tiny baby goose yesterday.  The parents are kind of freaking out over the adolescent cousin geese intimidating their baby.  Tonight, another big bird showed up and was flying around over the pond.  The bird was brown on the top and wings and had a white head and belly. The big bird was trying to catch something in the pond, so all the geese shut up and huddled on the banks and pretended they were rocks. A little black bird with red on its wings kept flying at the big bird but the big bird kept circling back.  The lady called the little white dog over to her because she didn't want the big bird to carry it away.  Then I guess the big bird got bored or tired of being pecked by the little bird, so it left. Which avoided significant eagle-induced trauma all the way around.   

Cats

It has been a long time since I posted anything on here.  So now I am going to post something about cats.  Us ponies do not have strong opinions about cats, like we do about dogs.  Cats are fairly homogeneous in size and are not usually very noisy when they are around ponies.  So we do not have to concern ourselves much about them.  When it is cold outside there is a cat that comes to the barn and lives in our hay.  He is a ginger cat that is the same color as Billy and Lulu and Siena.  He acts like he really likes the lady and purrs and rubs against her, but if she pets him, then he gets really mad when she stops.  He hisses and growls and bites her.  So she pets him real quick and then stops before he can grab her. He is supposed to be defending the hay bale strings from mice, so she tries to treat him like an employee.  When he was in the barn while there was still a lot of hay there, a black cat came to the barn too.  The black cat is afraid of everyone and hides and runs when the dogs or the lady show up.  The cats made a lot of noise, for cats, and the lady was worried about the cats fighting.  The other lady who came here and knows way more about cats than our lady said that she did not have to worry about the cats fighting because they were probably going to have kittens. So now there is hardly any hay in the barn and only a couple of bales go out to two of the pastures because most of us have grass to eat.  The ginger cat is not around any more but sometimes the black cat is lurking around.   Two days ago, the lady went to get hay in the barn and found three tiny newborn kittens on the floor. The kittens were cold and dead and the lady was sad because the kittens were so cute.   So today, she picked up a bale of hay and three tiny sibling kittens were mewling behind it. They are very cute too and the lady does not want the dogs to find them.  The dogs like to bite small furry things.  So she put the hay bales back around the kittens so that they have a hay cave.  We don't know what will happen to the cats.   

goose eggs

So as you know, there is a big dog that comes back here with the lady when she brings us nice hay on the little green truck thing.  The big dog is usually tied to the little green truck thing and he trots along next to it when it moves and when it stops, sometimes he barks at us.  But two days ago, the big dog was loose.  He was running wild like a maniac.  He  swoops under the fences and barks at the horses, he dives into the streams and sticks his head in the holes where the brown fuzzy animals live.  He goes tearing across the field like he has a big black cow running behind him, and then just before the woods, he stops and comes tearing back.  The lady yells at him and says "Let's go!"  and mostly he follows when he gets around to it.  The short white dog sits in the little green truck thing and tries to pretend the big dog isn't there.  The lady says the big dog has to grow up and learn to be a farm dog. He is doing a lot of learning at a fast speed, us ponies are tired just watching him zoom by.   Today, the lady was checking the fence by the pond and the short white dog came to help her and next thing she knew, there was a big honking bird running right at the little dog and making a racket.  The big dog came charging in for the rescue and chased the big bird clear across the pasture until it flew away.   Then later, the big dog was sticking his head in holes by the pond and the lady came to check on him and he was looking really proud of himself.  He came over to the lady and gave her a hard white ball that he found with a bunch of other balls along the shore of the pond.  There were two big honking floating birds that seemed to be pretty mad about that.  So the lady put him in a stall and she put the ball back with the other balls.   Then she got the hose and made the big dog really wet because he had been rolling in the stall and smelled a whole lot like a pony.  I think that big dog is going to smell like that for a long time if he is going to be a farm dog. 

Cold and the big dog

Cold, cold COLD!!!!!   There is white stuff everywhere.  It falls from the sky and covers everything.  The creeks where we used to drink are hard and covered with white stuff.  Sometimes the lady comes down with a stick and hits the white ground with it a bunch of times,  Then a spot gets wet again for a little while.  But by the next day, it is gray and hard again.  All of us ponies are frosty.  We have white frost on our coats and whiskers and eyelashes. This makes us especially cute. 

So yesterday the lady showed up with hay for us and she was really really late and we were all starving.  There MIGHT have still been some hay there for us to eat, but it was not good hay like the new hay.  The lady brought that big black dog with her.  The big black dog has an elevated sense of self-importance.  He sticks his head through the gate and then he barks and sometimes he tries to sneak in and sniff around.  If we come over to see what he is doing, he gets all panicky and runs back through the gate and then he tries to make us think he is a wolf and barks alot.  I have not seen wolfs, but I am pretty sure that big dog is not a wolf.  I think a wolf would smell wild.  That dog smells like he lives with the lady and the happy little white dog that just ignores us. (We have not seen the little dog since the white stuff is everywhere.)  After the lady put hay out for us, she and the big dog came into our pasture.  My sister Pinke was pretty surprised and excited to see that big dog walking right in next to the lady.  She started prancing and snorting and stuck her tail all up and went trotting over to tell the big dog to get out.  A bunch of us other ponies figured we had better back her up, just in case there was going to be trouble, so five of us arched our necks and blew at the big dog and circled around the back while Pinke came up in front  The big dog was really scared and wanted to run away -- Ha! Ha! Some kind of wolf he is!  But the lady told us to go back over to eat our hay and leave them alone, She made that shushing noise that means to back off.  So we tossed our heads and trotted back to the hay, but not before letting that big dog know that we were going to have him for lunch if we had the chance.  The lady and the big dog walked all along the pasture fence and then came back over to the gate, where we were watching for them and followed them so that big dog didn't get any of his uppity ideas.  That big dog just kind of hid behind the lady's legs and didn't say a word. I think we can teach him to be a good dog.