Road work with Bird plus First Fruits

I did about an hour and a half of road work with Bird last night. It was kind of damp and humid and I was kind of *meh* on the whole thing so I decided to go the bareback pad route. (A bareback pad is just a thick wool-n-suede pad with a girth, no stirrups or anything.) I figured it'd be fine.

( And was it fine? )

In my glamorous horse life...

This morning I swept out the chicken coop aisleway (a week or so of hay for Bird & his companion -currently Ceres - gets stored on the chicken coop aisleway, where the chickens mostly aren't allowed to be though there are escape-artist chickens sometimes) and schlepped 8 more bales of hay down from the barn and stacked them in the aisleway for the coming week. I threw a bale into the feeder (the hay feeder is located outside the chicken coop on a large, poured concrete slab in Bird's paddock) and secured it by way of a tethered carabiner through both bale strings.

( Why do you tie the hay bales into the feeder? )