Ash, gophers, horses

Today I did my annual cleaning of the house's chimney and the pipe that goes from the wood stove to the chimney.  It was almost a half day project and quite a dirty one.  I filled over half of a two gallon bucket with ash.

I am trapping pocket gophers again.  I caught four of them yesterday.  There were a few dirt mounds in the fruit tree and garden area indicating a pocket gopher.  So far no activity at the trap.  Now that I let the horses in this area I wonder if the pocket gopher moved on.  From my experience they avoid areas where horses are.  I think it has something to do with the horse urine and manure.

The couple came and got one of their horses, the black one.  "Bluebell".  Either she is getting fat from all the grass, or more likely she is pregnant.  If a pregnancy, it was an unplanned one as the couple planned on taking a year off from raising babies.

The other morning the one filly was in the north pasture and not the NE pasture where she was placed with the mare with the sore feet. I could not find signs of where she got through or over the fence.  When she came into the corral where the other horses were I was able to get her back into the NE pasture.  It took some effort as the mare wanted into the corral when I opened the gate to herd the filly back.  I would move the mare back away from the gate but whenever I walked back to reopen the gate the mare followed me.

Another complicating factor was the other filly wanted to be with this filly and the partially blind mare wanted this filly gone and would try to chase her away.

A three ring circus.  But after some effort I finally got the filly back into the NE pasture.

That lasted all of a half day as after the couple got the dark horse they decided to let all the horses be together.  They had concerns about how it would go.  The mare with the sore feet is a dominant horse but since she has sore feet she would be unable to assert her dominance.  The couple hoped that the horses had sorted out their personality conflicts over the fence.

They all seemed to get along once we let them all be together.  However today I see they are not all one big happy family.  When the three use the loafing shed they don't let the other two use it also.  This afternoon when the three were eating in the north pasture the other two used the loafing shed.  Later I noticed the partially blind mare threw a whinny fit while running around the corral.  Then the other two horses came out to the north pasture to eat, though not near the three.  It seems like the one mare doesn't like the others to use the loafing shed at all.  Tonight the three were in the loafing shed and the other two horses had to stand just outside of it.