My folks have a really nice Quarter Horse mare named Steel Hickory, whom they bought as a three year old and have gotten some of their best foals from. But for some reason, she hasn’t had a foal the last two years, and she has spent the whole time living fat and happy on their irrigated pastures. My dad doesn’t normally use mares for cattle work, unless they’re short horses and someone doesn’t mind riding a broodmare. But Hickory rarely gets ridden, though they rode her quite a bit when she was a three and four year old, she isn’t the push-button type of horse that gets used a lot on a cattle ranch.
So this past spring, my folks were planning on taking her over to a neighbor’s stallion that they really like, hoping for a good colt from her next year. She spent quite a while at the neighbor’s ranch, but he returned her with the opinion that she had never cycled and still wasn’t bred. So they put her back in her pasture and hoped to try again later. My sister tried using their own stallion, Docs Cold Cash, to tease her and see if she was in heat, but she just never seemed to respond, so they didn’t take her back to be bred by the neighbor’s stud.
Well, just about the time they had given up on her altogether, and were even talking about selling her, my sister noticed Hickory was starting to bag up. They called a vet out, who confirmed that she was in foal, but their known breeding attempt dates were no where close enough. “This is a much bigger foal than that,” the vet said, “She’s going to foal real soon.”
Sure enough! On November 1, she had a cute little bay filly with two white socks and a big star on her face. She was born just fine, and the temperatures were mild for that time of year, so in spite of the surprise, she is doing great. My folks were thrilled to have her, and by counting backwards from her birth date, they determined that the only stallion that could have fathered her was their own buckskin stallion, Doc. They remembered having Hickory and Doc in adjacent corrals, and though a strong pole fence separated them the entire time, the vet told them that sort of thing happens all the time!
They got the papers filled out and the breeding report sent in to include her, so the little surprise filly will be registered and most likely make one nice horse someday. But it’s funny that Hickory kept them scratching their heads all summer long, and turned out to know just what she was doing after all.
The new filly’s first day out:
Getting used to being handled:
She is so curious!
Hickory and her 2008 filly, Honeycomb:
AQHA Stallion, Docs Cold Cash, the filly’s sire:
Hickory and Doc:
