Marco! Ponio!

 Marco is a bay pony that lives in the pasture next to us.  He lives with my Mom, Tudi, and some gray ponies and Little Mat. Sometimes people ask the lady if she has "rescues" and then she points to Marco. His name didn't used to be Marco, but she thinks this name fits him.   When Marco eats grass and Hey!, it wads up in his mouth and falls back out.   So he has to eat special food that none of his pasture mates are allowed to eat.  He eats his special feed out of a bag that the lady hangs on his head every morning and afternoon.  This morning, when the lady went back to retrieve the bag off Marco's head, Marco was lying down on top of a big puddle that had gotten hard because it was really really cold out.  The puddle is about twice as wide as a pony and had white stuff on top of it.  When Marco tried to get up, his hooves would just scrape across the hard water.  The big dog was really excited about seeing him lying down like that and acted like he really wanted to eat him, but that is silly because who would eat a pony?  The lady took his feed bag and then she tried to push him but her big floppy feet were sliding on the hard water too.  Then she got ahold of his tail and thought if she could just slide him a little bit, he could get his feet under him.  But then he flailed his legs and next thing she knew, she was lying on the hard puddle too!   So then she and the big dog decided to go back up to the barn and bring the orange machine down to pull Marco to the side of the hard puddle.  But when they were about ten pony lengths away, Marco thrashed around a little bit and got up.   So then the lady and the big dog watched him for a while to make sure he could walk okay as he went over to the other ponies and chased them away from Hey! that he can't eat.       

The bridge

 Today was horrible!  We left before the lady threw out our Hey! and then she didn't come back to see where we were until she gave the old ponies their lunch.  She was walking toward the pond to take pictures of the ducks and she could see that we were running in our pasture.  So she walked all the way back and went into Marco's pasture and then she crawled under the predator-proof fence (which is apparently not very predator proof) and then under the wire fence and then under the electric fence rope and then she was in our pasture.   She asked us why were were running back and forth by the creek, so we went over to the bridge so she could see the terrible problem.  The board at the other end of the bridge was loose and had slid over about the width of a pony hoof.  It was really really scary.  The bridge is all white and now there was a horrific dark gap at the end of the bridge.  The lady walked across the bridge and petted some of us ponies.  Then she said "C'mon Harley" and Harley followed her onto the bridge.  She stopped when she got to the end of the bridge and told Harley he should jump over the dark gap. Then she jumped to show him and Harley jumped too and then they were on the other side of the creek.   Harley was happy to be over there away from the rest of us.  He thought there would be carrots and riding and fun stuff, but instead, the lady came back over to our side and asked my big sister Gypsy to come across the bridge.  Harley is our big brother, but Gypsy is the boss of us.   Gypsy walked on the bridge.  She sniffed it and pawed it and looked at the dark gap and then she said "No way" and backed off the bridge  She told the rest of the ponies to back away, so we all ran over to the creek to see if we could find another way across that had miraculously opened since the last time we looked.  So the lady came over to the creek and walked across where we usually drink water and ford the creek when there isn't white stuff everywhere. You know, now with the white stuff, the water gets hard and gray and slippy on top and then it gets white stuff on top of that, so it is especially scary. The lady walked on the hard water and it made loud banging noises and then it came apart and you could see some of the dark wet water underneath it. So there was no way we could walk in that.  She did that to a couple of places, but they were all dangerous. So she went back to the bridge and took off the wobbly board because she said she didn't want anyone to step on it.  Under where the board used to be there was now a gigantic hole  The hole was so deep that if a pony put its foot in the hole, it would go way way down to where you would not even be able to see its ankle.  She then asked some of us other ponies to cross the bridge.  So Pinke trotted up and jumped across the hole and then Lulu. And then Sienna.   I thought about crossing the bridge, but it really was super scary and Gypsy did not think it was a good idea.  Then the lady got some Hey! from Marco's shed and she did that funny clop noise  thing with her tongue and next thing we knew,  Gypsy got bold and so the rest of us decided to go too. So our breakfast was super late and turned into dinner and we almost all died falling through the bridge.  So tomorrow, we are not going anywhere near that bridge.  Maybe.      

Coyote

 In the morning, there was a funny noise coming from behind the trees  over toward where the big scary black cows hang out.  The noise was kind of like when there is a a squeaky wheel, going "Ooh-ah!" over and over and over again.  The lady looked at the big dog and asked "Is that a dog barking?"  The big dog agreed that it sounded like a dog, but he didn't care because he couldn't see any dog around and he can't be bothered being worried about far away dogs that he has never even met.  Then the sound came from behind the woods by our out-back pasture, except we weren't out-back there because we were up-front eating Hey! The lady took some Hey! to Marco and his buddies with the big orange machine.  While the ponies were eating their Hey!, they stopped and all stared and pointed their noses at an animal that came running across the pasture out of the woods.  At first, the lady thought it was a fox, but when it got closer, she could see that it was a small coyote.  The coyote hardly looked at the ponies as it was loping by.  Ponies do not care about coyotes, so the ponies went back to eating their Hey! The lady walked toward the woods where the coyote came from and she heard another lady calling something, but then there was no more noise.  The lady was glad that no dogs or other ladies came into the pasture to chase the coyote.  She would like the coyote to stay in her woods.  She thinks there are plenty of bunnies for the coyote to eat.  She also thinks that the summer population of Canada honkers exceeds the optimum pond capacity and would not mind if the coyote ate 50 or 60 of them.  

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.