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WILD HORSES of STAGECOACH
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Part Thirteen
The Turf Farm Band
Taking a snooze behind a residence.
Sometimes identifying wild horse bands can be confusing. While some bands maintain the same primary members for years, others tend to "trade" members as a result of stallion fights or during winter band gatherings. Young stallions are pushed out of bands when they reach breeding age and oftentimes younger mares will switch bands. Young mature stallions will start forming up their own bands. These "membership games" are all natural behaviors that help maintain genetic diversity.
Making things even more confusing, a few stallions have been known to join with other compatible stallions and maintain merged bands when not in breeding season. Amazingly we've seen two competing stallions play together one day and viciously drive off a rival encroaching on their combined territory on another. Perhaps the compatible stallions were bachelor buddies before they were old enough to have their own harems or perhaps they just made friends at a winter gathering.
Then we have urban sprawl encroaching into the wild horse range displacing bands from their established territories. Such displacement can have a ripple affect. If a more dominant band is displaced, that band may in turn displace a less dominant band from its territory and on the chain of displacement goes until the horses all redistribute themselves within the remaining available range. And occasionally we will have a stallion hit on the highway whereupon the mares may fragment and join other bands unless a bachelor picks them up right away.
Until we get really clear photos to study that show the colors and markings of a majority of the band members it is often easy to get bands mixed up... especially bands of horses consisting of primarily bay and sorrel colors and of similar numbers. Until yesterday when I was able to get close-up photos of face and leg markings, we believed the Turf Farm Band to actually be either the Stagecoach Seven or Iron Mountain Band. However it turns out that these are distinctively different horses, a band that was likely pushed out of the developing Dayton Valley and that displaced the Stagecoach Seven. Furthermore this band isn't worried about being close to human dwellings, dogs, vehicles, etc., a trait common to many Dayton Valley horse bands.
Grabbing a light lunch.
Slipping in to snack on someone's lawn.
"No you don't." (I chased them out.)
"What other mischief can we get into?"
"Lots of mischief."
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