(no subject)

[which_chick]

Saturday I spent at the second 4-H horse thingie. I was going to take a picture of TJ, but he inexplicably decided he wanted to grow a goatee. It is not a good look for him. My niece Gwendolyn looks better with her goatee than TJ looks with his. I am not sure what effect he is trying achieve, but the general effect he IS achieving is that he's half-swallowed a mangy rat. Should he decide to shave, I'll take a picture of him.

Sunday morning I went gathering nuts in May firewood before it got too beastly hot. When that happened, I attacked part of Mt. Willow. See, there was a huge, ugly willow tree behind one of our properties in Bedford. It was huge. It was ugly. We had it cut down so that it became a huge, ugly, HORIZONTAL tree. Er. Not quite the improvement I'd hoped for, but what the hell. Anyway, since then we've been cutting it up and splitting it (the pieces are too heavy to lift onto the truck if we don't split them into at least quarters first) and schlepping the pieces home on the dumptruck so that they can be dumped in my yard. As I heat with wood, I will eventually manage to dispose of the huge, ugly willow tree though, given the amount of wood involved, it may be some time until I'm done disposing of it. As of this morning, most of the willow tree was in big chunks in my yard, a pile that I, at least mentally, referred to as Mt. Willow. I took a picture.



I stacked rather a lot of the wood in question. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, done, but I made a good start. I took a picture of the progress, which I'm sure you're all drooling with anticipation to get a gander at. You're in luck.



ornery_chick asked for pictures of Japanese iris when they bloomed. One of 'em did, finally. At my house, the peonies are just about gone, if that helps with timing. Anyway. It bloomed and I took pictures. Following these pictures, the deer jumped the fence into my yard and ate off the blooms, so good on me for taking the pictures when I did. Also, if you're out there in reader-land (and of course you are!), email me a mailing address and I'll get your I. pseudocoras dug up and mailed out this week -- they're ready to go.



Also, I went over to look at my amazingly pregnant horse:



Note the number of legs, there. Here's a better view, for those who aren't real up on the whole farm animal thing:



It's a filly (girl), looks like it'll stay chestnut (the reddish color it is), and has one white foot, star, strip, and snip (the white parts on the face). The baby horse, who is 7/8 Arabian, is about a day and a half old. Her color tells us some interesting things about (all together now) horse coat color genetics, a subject near and dear to my heart. Look, I spent eighty bucks for a definitive book on the subject, so you're going to have to listen to me trot out this cluefulness on every remotely-relevant occasion. When one is quite good friends with a bunch of people who breed horses, horse coat color genetics come up a lot.

Since sara_merry99 asked for baby horse pictures, here's another, a purebred Arabian stud colt that Irish Red threw here a day or so ago:



He's already sold.

Back to horse coat color genetics. The baby is chestnut. The mare (Meatly) is black. The stud (Glory, the idiot who keeps jumping the fence) is grey. How did we get to chestnut starting with black and grey?

Grey is a dominant gene that masks the horse's actual basic color genes. Horses can start with any base color and turn grey as they age. This makes it difficult to tell what sorts of color grey horses will throw. The fact that Glory has thrown more than a few colored (not grey) foals means that he's definitely heterozygous on the grey front. If he weren't, he'd only ever have had grey babies. Right. So, he's Gg on the grey front. What about the rest of the color? He's thrown chestnut babies to Meatly and to Irish Red this year.

Previously, I talked about bay, black, and chestnut horses. Reviewing for the people who weren't paying attention back then, it works like this:

A locus: If there is black, it restricts it to legs, mane, and tail (Aa or AA) for a BAY horse or lets it run rampant all over the horse (aa) for a BLACK horse.
E locus: Tells if there is any black expressed. If (Ex or EE) the black is expressed. If ee, the black is not expressed.

AxEx -> bay horse
aaEx -> black horse
xxee -> chestnut horse, regardless of what you have on the A locus.

Meatly is a black horse. She is aaEx, which we can tell from just looking at her.
Wren, Meatly's baby four years ago (to Glory) is a bay horse. She has to be AaEx (big A from Glory, small a from Meatly)
Meatly's baby this year is a chestnut horse. She HAS to be axee due to her mother's genes on the A locus and her expressed coloration.
Meatly, therefore, is actually aaEe due to having both bay and chestnut babies. She's also had two solid black fillies so I'm pretty solid on the aa front.

Glory, damn his lustful heart, has to be at least AxxeGg based on what we know from his get thus far. To pin him down on the other half of the E locus, we'd need to see a black or bay baby out of a chestnut mare. Similarly, a solid black baby out of a bay, chestnut, or black mare would pin him down for sure on the A locus. Unfortunately, you get what you get and there are lots of possible horse colors for babies from whom no new information can be gained.

Comments

[ornery-chick.livejournal.com]

Hey there! Mt. Willow looks good all stacked up there. It portends a comfy winter. And Meatly's baby is so sweet! Already she has a very perky, clever look about her.

Also, cool irises! I'll be sending you my mailing address directly.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

The girls got to ... well, not ride. Sit on an Arabian mare this weekend at a bridal shower. The mother of one of the attendants (it was her house) was kind enough to let all the Pre-teens take a turn on Ferny. I'm so sorry, but I'm not sure what color she is. A beautiful brown, darker than the filly up above. No white.

She was very patient, and I had the lucky honor of walking beside the kids to make sure they didn't scare the horse or fall off of her. Considering how placid she was, the kids would have had to TRY to fall off, but just in case...

The owner and I were trying to convince the girls that horse poop smells good. Which it does, compared, say, to cow manure. Or chickens or pigs. Unfortunately the girls and I had met some horses at Blue Marsh a month ago, and I don't know WHAT they were eating, but I'd never smelled horse poop that was like that before. yuck!

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Should they have any further interest in sitting on a pleasant, trustworthy pony suitable for young-ish persons, I can provide opportunities along that front when you visit. Since Meatly and the IRH are somewhat complicated, this would be on a more sensible, sedate pony (probably the one Cass rides).

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the foal pictures!! I had a bag of a day and I needed the little pick me up of nice horse pictures at the end of the day. So the two foals are by the Glory? He sires pretty babies, anyway.

Congratulations with your scaling of Mt. Willow, that's an impressive lot of work getting all that wood stacked.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he makes pretty babies. If he didn't, he'd be sold and they'd get a different stud. Since about all he does is make babies, it's important that he do a good job at that. (He's more-or-less broke to ride but since he went through the high tensile fence (to get to the mares, natch) and tore the shit out of his back legs, he's not been sound enough to really ride. He doesn't limp loose in the field, but he does after about thirty minutes of being ridden.)