Fern’s Great Escape And The Third Grader Herd

The weather finally shifts in the high Colorado Rockies, and that one change touches everything when you live off grid with horses. We open with an honest update on Merlin and what it looks like to care for an aging horse when you suspect the next winter may be too much. We talk about the day-to-day signals we watch, why “pain” is a tricky word, and how our focus stays on comfort, connection, and making sure his time with us feels safe and valued.

Then monsoon season shows its teeth. Rain is a gift after months of dry ground, but slick footing can be dangerous, especially for a senior horse who circles and crab walks. We explain why straw can be the wrong choice in a paddock, and how we use pine shavings to change the grip and stability of the dirt so Merlin can keep his balance.

After dark, the calm disappears. A fence panel comes apart, the herd erupts, and a dust cloud forms so thick Alex can barely see the pens. Fern is suddenly out, weaving through pine and aspen with downed timber everywhere. We walk through how we find her, how we use voice and presence to slow the chaos, and what happens the moment she’s back where she belongs.

We finish with practical summer horse management: flies, bees, and water access. From daily manure cleanup to fly predators, ranch fly traps, specific bait, and careful fly spray use, we share what works for us at 9,300 feet. If you’ve got better tricks, we want them. Subscribe, share this with a horse friend, and leave a review so more off-grid and equine folks can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome To Life Off Grid

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome to another edition of Off Grid with Horses. I'm Russell.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

And I'm Alex. Russell and I are going to share two life adventures of our lives with horses on our Colorado mountain ridge.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

We live way off grid at 9,300 feet above sea level, high in the Colorado Rockies.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Where the air is thin.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

But the breathing is easy. And life is hard. But the living is good. Welcome to OffGrid with Horses.

Merlin’s Health And Comfort

SPEAKER_00 0:46

And we've been speaking the past few weeks, talking a lot about Merlin. Alice, why don't you give us a brief update on how Merlin's doing?

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Well, I guess I have to say that it's becoming clearer and clearer that these are probably the last days that Merlin is going to have. And I don't, I hopefully don't mean like the next few days, but I don't think that he's going to be going through another winter with us. But that's okay. We're spending every moment, every possible way helping him to be able to feel loved and appreciated and like his time here on Earth has been worth it.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

But he's not in pain or anything at this point, is he?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

I don't really know. I mean, as we age, you know, I'm in my I I'm in my mid-50s now, and I'm in pain. But I'm not ready to give up my life because of it, you know? So that's kind of a relative term. You know, he walks around, he pins his ears and has social relations with the other horses that are around and in his herd. And he runs from the mare that chases him all the time still. And so he's doing pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

So he's still with us and he's trucking along.

Monsoon Mud And Safe Footing

SPEAKER_00 2:00

We're in the summer, we call the monsoon season now. So we're getting finally we're getting some rain. Yay! Yeah, it's been a really, really dry like eight months, but now we're getting some rain, and that's good and bad. I mean, it's it's great. We need the water, but on the other hand, it's it makes it more difficult, especially for Merlin, because everything gets slick. And what are you doing to help keep the ground from being so slippery for Merlin?

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Well, a lot of people would think that I would put down some straw to be able to make it softer and maybe keep it dry, but that's actually exactly the wrong thing for this particular guy. He does something that's called crab walking, which includes going in circles. And when he goes in circles, he kind of anything that's on the ground that could get tied up in his feet does, and then he can fall over really easily. And so what we add is shavings and the they're pine shavings specifically. I personally like the large flake shavings rather than the fine shavings, and they help by absorbing and they also kind of change the the structure of the dirt. It changes it into something that isn't quite so slippery, but something that has just a little bit more grip. And so his whole little paddock, and if you know horses, you know that normally paddocks don't get filled with shavings, just stalls. But his whole paddock is filled with shavings to help him be able to retain his balance.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

And did anything else happen in this past week that was exciting or different? Oh,

Fern Breaks Out After Dark

SPEAKER_00 3:34

good golly.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

There's always new and exciting things. It's not like it could ever be dull. So I don't remember what day it was, but I went outside to do last check, I think, and there was a there was neighing. And that's the the horses, that's the sound that horses make that goes, me and whinnying and neighing, and and there was progressively more and more commotion, and I'm like, oh no. And it was after dark, so I went out, and as I got closer and closer to the pens, I was like, I could see less and less. There was a huge, it was before the rain, and there was a huge dust ball that the horses were creating from running around.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

I literally could not see that the one of the panels had came completely apart from and and when when Alex just I'm gonna interject a little bit, when Alex says there's neighing, this was not, I was inside during this. There was not like one horse gently neighing, cute and sweet. I mean, there was a ruckus. There were a lot of them, you know, almost everybody was neighing. Another way to to think about it was that the horses were screaming and hollering, they were all uptight, they were really, really upset and running around. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

And all that running around caused the dust ball that caused me to not even be able to see how the fence had been come completely apart. And Merlin, it must have just happened because Merlin was standing there with his butt towards the fence, kind of looking around, going, What's going on? Why is there all this commotion? And Fern was missing.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

What what what happened to Fern? Where did she go?

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Well, there was a huge dust storm. So I have no idea. I can just hear everybody screaming. And so what I did was I just started talking, you know, because of course horses are vibrational creatures. They use a lot of body language and a lot of sounds to be able to communicate with one another. And so I started making sounds. They all know that I'm the boss mare. And I was telling them all, you know, hey, hey, what are you doing? Knock it off. First thing I did was I shut the gate and then I started looking for fern. And I saw some movement. I have my headlamp, it's pretty wimpy, and I saw some eyeballs reflecting going by really quickly, and I'm like, oh, that must be her. She must be around on the outside. And she had gone around the far side. And when I say the far side, it's not like we have a nice wide open field, and the horses are in a pen in the middle of it. The horses are one side of their pen, it runs down the driveway, and it's nice and sort of neat and organized. But the back side of the horses' pens actually go into a pine and aspen grove. And there's a lot of trees back there, and not only trees that are standing, but trees that are fallen down as well. And so Fern was trying really pathetically, I have to say, sorry, Fern, to make it through all the downed timber as well as the timber that was standing in her way, around just close around the back side of the paddock, of all the paddocks of all the horses. And so I started heading around behind her. And so I followed the same route that she had taken. I was talking to her the whole time, just telling her, hey, don't you want to come back and hang out? Hey, don't you want to come back in and hang out with your friends and have some hey? And so she was agitated. All the horses were screaming. She was screaming a little bit. She was just like, Oh my gosh, I don't know what happened. How am I back here? What am I doing back here? How did I get out of my pen? This isn't any fun. What's going on? And she ran around a bit and she started to like head back up through a clearing away from the other horses. And I moved to I say get in her way. She was like 40 feet away from me, but I still moved to energetically block her forward progress motion and was talking to her and telling her she was just being silly. And she stopped and she listened to me. And so I walked over to her and I I think she had her her muzzle on still, which is she normally doesn't escape. Escaping is not completely unusual for her. But she normally does not tear the part fence apart and does not escape with her muzzle on because, well, what could she do? There's nothing to eat, and that's her entire world. So anyway, I found her and Lily was here and Russell was here, and sometime during the process of what I experienced, they had their own experience.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

So when Alex finally got fern, she put a Did you have a lead rope? I don't recall. I don't think so. So she she started leading her down, and the paddocks for the horses, that's their security. Uh they they actually like being in the paddocks. And when a horse gets out of the paddock, when they walk out, at first they're excited, but then they get scared because they're they're out and they're not where they're supposed to be, their friends aren't around them. And so once Alex got a hold of Fern, Fern just relaxed because she thought, okay, now I'm safe. Mom's got me, and she brought her back into the paddock. And if you think of the other horses, when something like this happens, when one walks out of the paddock, they all go nuts. And the best way that I can think of to describe our horses when they're all going nuts is if you think of a class of third graders that are throwing paper airplanes and shooting rubber bands and jumping up and down on their desks and screaming and hollering and running around. That's basically our horses when one gets out. I mean, they're running around, they're bucking, they're neighing, they're making such a ruckus, as Alex said, that the dust was like a heavy fog and she couldn't see. So that's what happened. We got Fern then back into the paddock. And then as soon as she's back in, then everybody gathers around Fern because they all want to hear what happened, where she went, what was her adventure, and they want to make sure that she's okay. Once they determine that she's okay and they've heard her story, then they kind of go back into their normal ignoring talk to the hand type of thing. But that that was Fern's great adventure.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

What's

Herd Drama And Fern’s Recovery

SPEAKER_01 10:24

really nice about Fern's great adventure this time is she's been under treatment for uh quite a while, getting her her herself fixed. There's been a bunch of things that were wrong with her. But normally when she is out and about, when she goes off on a little adventure, she comes back in and she's very sore. She can hardly walk for the next few days. And that didn't happen this time. So hooray! She is healing, she's getting her wellness and her health back.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

Yeah, and that's been a long, long haul for her. We have worked and worked with multiple farriers and the vet trying to work out her hoofs. And maybe next time or or sometime coming up, we'll describe just what's going on with her hoofs. I'd

Flies Bees And Simple Control Tactics

SPEAKER_00 11:10

like to talk a little bit about flies. Change gears a little bit. Now that we're getting a little bit more moisture, we're getting some flies. And maybe some of you are also having fly issues. And if you have any great tricks on flies, please send us an email. Send it to info at offgridwithhorses.com. That's info at offgridwithhorses.com. But I want to tell you a little bit about what we're doing with the fly situation and a related issue, and that's bees. What we do with the bees, this sounds kind of odd, but we set out a little water pail just for the bees. And it has a flat area. It's a lid from a 55-gallon drum, and we fill it with water, and it has a flat enough area that they can land. And if we do that close to the horse's water, they'll leave the horses' water alone. And so we do that at several places around the paddocks so that the bees will hopefully leave the horses' water alone because sometimes the bees will be so thick that the horses just won't drink anything or or go around the water because there's just too many bees.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

And also the bees can sometimes bees and yellow jackets and all kinds of critters like that, they'll try to get the water and then they drown in the water. And then the horses can't get through the layer of insects to get their own water.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

So with the flies, there's a couple of techniques that we do. First of all, the very basic, we clean the manure every single day. So we we pick up the manure and we try to do that in the morning before it gets warm and that creates more fly issues. Another thing that we do is we use fly predators. We get them from spaulding labs, and they send us fly predators, which are just other insects, just little bugs, but those bugs eat the fly larvae and that helps. I don't I don't think it's a great cure, but I think it does help a little bit to have the fly predators. We get, I think, four groups of predators, and then we get, I don't know, there's like 10,000 or 20,000 predators that that come in the mail and in a little bag, and then we we spread them out in the uh paddocks. We also use fly traps, and fly traps. I have tried many, many, many types of fly traps. The one that I found is the best. All it is, I think that's called a ranch fly trap. You can get them on Amazon. They are a green net, and then they are kind of triangular or cone shaped, and there's a cone inside it, and then a bowl of water bait underneath it. They're not expensive, they're not fancy. I haven't found them at Tractor Supply or Murdox. I have to order them. Tractor supply and Murdox will have these fancy ones. I don't like them very well. They do work more or less, but they they're more expensive, and I just I don't think they work as well. So the ranch fly traps that are say they're a green net, and then they have a little bowl at the bottom, and you put the bait in the bottom. The bait is extremely important. If you just read online about it, they'll say, well, use anything flies like you know, fruit or something like that. I've not found that to be effective. What I use is outdoor fly trap refill refill bait by Bug Bane, and it comes in a little package, is designed for one of their fancy fly traps. I don't use it in the fancy fly trap, I just make a gallon jug of it and then pour it in the bowls that are at the bottom of our fly traps. That seems to work pretty well, but it you have to have a lot of fly traps. We have a fly trap, probably one every 20 feet or so. And if you do that, that helps keep the flies a little bit in control. We also use fly spray for the horses directly, but the fly spray you've got to be very careful because the fly spray will affect the horses. Sometimes they get welts and sores from the fly spray. So try a brand, use it on your horse. If it starts breaking out the horse, go to a different brand. So that's our fly technique. We don't use a lot of fly masks or leg wraps. We go the other direction, try and eliminate the flies. So now we're almost out of time. So

Email Us Your Fly Tips

SPEAKER_00 16:03

if you have any comments or anything that you'd like to add or anything that you'd like to say, give us an email at info at off grid with horses. That's info at offgrid with horses dot com. So till next time, we will talk to you later.