{"id":23728,"date":"2014-05-07T06:00:32","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T12:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=23728"},"modified":"2014-05-07T09:27:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T15:27:51","slug":"wild-horses-colts-mating-dust-baths-and-more-fighting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/07\/wild-horses-colts-mating-dust-baths-and-more-fighting\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Horses – Colts, Mating, Dust Baths And More Fighting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two days ago I was able to spend enough time with these wild horses in the west desert of Utah to begin to get a feel for their complex social life.\u00a0 But I believe that I’ve only scratched the surface.<\/p>\n

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There were about a dozen colts in the herd (some mares were still pregnant)\u00a0and they were as cute as buttons.<\/p>\n

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When they’d go off by themselves they’d play with each other in groups of two…<\/p>\n

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or three.<\/p>\n

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I witnessed two attempted matings.\u00a0 When this stallion mounted the mare the dust on her back went flying.\u00a0 This was a surreptitious attempt – notice the approaching shadow from the\u00a0right which belongs to…<\/p>\n

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another male who didn’t take kindly to the attempt.\u00a0 The apparent interloper “dismounted”…<\/p>\n

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and beat a hasty retreat.\u00a0 The white horse wasn’t about to forgive and forget so it gave extended chase to the darker one in an apparent attempt to teach it some manners.<\/p>\n

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The horses apparently\u00a0come to this area on the valley floor for two reasons – to drink from the water tank and to take dust baths.\u00a0 Because of all the hooved traffic in the area the vegetation is sparse and there are dust wallows everywhere.\u00a0 I used to think that bison were champion wallowers but these horses put them to shame.<\/p>\n

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Believe me, when one of the fights would break out nearby it really got my attention.\u00a0 The size and power of these horses at this close range is impressive<\/em>!<\/p>\n

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This fight broke out quite a distance from me and in side light but I was stunned by the quickness and athleticism\u00a0of this kick.\u00a0 Just prior to this shot the buckskin had fallen over backwards onto its back from a rearing position and I was extremely disappointed to have missed that sequence because I wasn’t prepared.\u00a0 The kick landed on the\u00a0upper neck of the buckskin where you can see the dust\u00a0flying off.<\/p>\n

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This fight broke out close enough that I instinctively reacted in a way that severely tilted my camera.\u00a0 Notice all the fighting scars on the back of the foreground horse.<\/p>\n

Ok, after today’s post I’ll move on to more traditional feathered fare since I’ve now made two back to back posts on these horses and I know that many of you come here for birds.\u00a0 Couldn’t help myself though – at this point I’m completely enamored by these wild\u00a0horses.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Two days ago I was able to spend enough time with these wild horses in the west desert of Utah to begin to get a feeling for their complex social life.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,2002],"tags":[2004,140,1016,311,533,2003],"class_list":["post-23728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-wild-horses","tag-colts","tag-fighting","tag-mating","tag-utah-2","tag-west-desert","tag-wild-horses-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/wild-horse-1503-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-6aI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}