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Pre 2022 material from the old website

Is Your Horse in a Good Mood? See if It Snorts.

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My horse, Abanico, snorts and talks quite a bit. I found this article forwarded to me by my dear friend Mary Cook quite enlightening! I hope you find it as well—Linda P Published in the New Your Times By Karen Weintraub July 11, 2018 Photo Credit: Miguel Vidal/Reuters No one can talk to a horse, of course. But a new study set out to find whether horses are trying to tell us something when they snort. In the study, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers in France determined that the snorting exhale that horses often make may be a sign of a positive emotion. Mathilde Stomp, a doctoral student at the University of Rennes who led the research, said she set out to understand whether the snort could be used as an measure of the horse’s mood. She and her collaborators recorded 560 snorts among 48 privately owned and riding school horses. All the horses snorted — as little as once or as often as 13 times an hour. The horses mainly snorted during calm and relaxing activities, and those that spent more time out of doors snorted the most, the study found.

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The Curious History of Horses in North America

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Caption: Fossilized horse teeth—a molar and an incisor with some enamel remaining—from approximately 13 million years ago  (made you look!) Serendipity struck while I was doing research on the limber pines at Pawnee Buttes, near the junction of the boundaries of CO, NB and WY. While on a break, I found shade and a soft seat on a pile of sand eroded from a tall cliff. I was sifting the soft sediment with my left hand when my fingers encountered something hard just below the surface. I extracted it and found myself staring at a fossilized tooth, an incisor that retained some of its enamel. A few minutes later I found a molar. These were from an ancestor of modern horses that lived 13 million years ago (mya). My lucky find of fossil teeth reminded me that horses were native to North America (NA), but their history has some intriguing twists and turns during their migration around the world. The family Equidae, which includes horses, zebras and asses, evolved in NA during the Eocene Epoch, 54 mya. The genus Equus, including the horse, Equus ferus, evolved during the Pliocene, between 4.5 and 4.0 mya in NA. During glacial periods, accumulation of ice on land lowered sea level to the point that an enormous expanse of land called Beringia connected current day Siberia and Alaska. Approximately 4 mya horses spread across NA and some populations migrated across Beringia to Asia and then to Europe. As recently as the Pleistocene Epoch (2.5 mya to 11,700 ya) the family Equidae

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Happy Trails – Hermit Park Update: Limber Pine Trail, Kruger Equestrian Campground

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By Suzanne Webel Larimer County Parks and Open Lands has recently opened a brand new trail complex at its 1,362 acre Hermit Park Open Space near Estes Park. Time to go check it out! Stop near the entrance station and pay the nominal $6 entry fee. It’s worth it, because this is an exceedingly horse-friendly park. There is new, excellent, designated horse trailer parking at the Kruger Equestrian Campground (P-1). The CG itself is a well-designed facility with five level sites, each of which has two sturdy pens with buckets, and the area has a nice restroom complete with a hitching rail! There is also designated horse trailer parking at the end of the road, the Moose Meadow Trailhead (P-2). Assuming you start here, proceed down the road to the new trail junction, “Moose Meadow / Limber Pine” trails. (The previously-constructed trail connection from Hermit Park to Homestead Meadows has now been abandoned because it was hopelessly steep, rocky, narrow, and unsustainable.) Proceed up to the next trail junction. If you turn left on the Moose Meadow Trail you will find yourself on your way to Homestead Meadows (see revised Homestead Meadows trail log). Turn right on the Limber Pine Trail, so named for the tree whose needles are so pliable you can gather a bundle of them and tie them in knots. We didn’t notice any). The trail then meanders for 1.4 miles through somewhat boring piney woods to another junction, the 0.3 mile link trail down to the Equestrian Campground. Continue straight on Limber

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