Reinventing bad science one theory at a time.
My evening at the barn last night definitely falls under the "weird shit always happens to me" category.
Normally she's standing at the stall door, impatient and nickering. Last night, she completely ignored me. Instead, she stood staring intently at her food bucket. Every once in a while, she'd give it a good hard nudge with her nose. If that didn't get the desired result, she'd violently hit it. Now, Tisa had been fed hours before and it takes her about 30 seconds to eat. She only gets 1/3 of a cup of grain a feeding, just enough to keep her happy while everyone else gets their quarts of food. She's also never been a bucket banger, a horse that makes massive noise with their food pan in the hope of attracting more food. For her to ignore a person in favor of an empty food bucket is incredibly out of character. Even after I opened the stall door and called to her, the food bucket took priority over me. Well, OBVIOUSLY, I needed to go find out what was so interesting.
Inside was a baby mouse, large enough to be covered in fine fur and somewhat mobile, but small enough that its eyes were still shut. It wobbled around blindly inside the bucket. Whenever it huddled down and sat still, Tisa would smack the bucket and make it roll around and start moving again.
Now I'm not the type to let my horse torture a baby mouse to death. I gathered it up, put it in an unused pail and thoroughly searched her stall for other random critters. Nothing. Just one small lost baby mouse.
By this time I was risking being late to my lesson, so I tacked up and spent an hour being tortured* by my instructor. After the lesson, I walked Tisa out to dry her off. All told, we were out of the stall for about 90 minutes. I put her back in and put my tack away. Paid my instructor. Came back to say goodnight. Tisa was staring at her food bucket.
Sure enough, inside it was another baby mouse. Now her bucket is just a triangular black plastic pail mounted to the wall. Its not like there's anywhere to hide in there. I gathered the mouse up and went to have Words(tm) with the other riders present. I'm all for pranks but baby mice are poor form. On the way out of the stall, I found another mouse on the floor. Mouse count, three. Explanations, zero.
After talking to the other girls, it became pretty clear that none of them were involved. Most wouldn't even look at what I was carrying, let alone touch one. Who knew horse women were such prisses.
That led me to decide that I had the first known instance of it raining baby mice in New England, if not the world. So into Tisa's stall I went and, sure enough, there was an open spot high up in the wall where the hayloft ended. It just happened to line up with Tisa's feed bucket. Okay, more proof for the raining mice theory.
I wandered down to the house in search of Wayne, the barn owner's husband and keeper of all useful tools. I was in need of a step ladder to get into the hayloft. Wayne, intrigued, agreed to help me in my search for the source of the mouse rain.
We got up into the hayloft. Now the hayloft in this building isn't used for storage. There are two barns on the property and the other one is much more convient to pull a truck into. All the hay and most of the shavings are stored in that hayloft and this one is normally ignored. It hadn't had anything or one in it in a very long time according to the the 1/2 inch of dust on the floor. On the other hand, it didn't have anything BUT dust in it either. No hay, no shavings. You could see the entire floor area and there was nothing in there. I was hoping for an obvious nest somewhere that we could put the little mice into but no luck.
We worked our way over to the area above Tisa's stall and found .... lots of spiral patterns in the dust. Circles and circles and three little paths leading to the edge of the hole above Tisa's stall. No paths leading from anywhere else. No paths into the spirals, just the three leading out. The roof above that entire area is solid plywood, so they didn't drop down from points higher. It was as though three baby mice had spontaneously appeared in the middle of the floor in the hayloft.
Okay, so my piece of weirdness wasn't actually a rain of baby mice, it was the spontaneous generation of baby mice. I had thought that theory was abandoned in Victorian times but I still don't have another explanation. Baby mice appeared where none had been previously and proceded to fall into my horse's food bucket. Unless baby mice can fly, I'm stuck with spontaneous generation.
Normally she's standing at the stall door, impatient and nickering. Last night, she completely ignored me. Instead, she stood staring intently at her food bucket. Every once in a while, she'd give it a good hard nudge with her nose. If that didn't get the desired result, she'd violently hit it. Now, Tisa had been fed hours before and it takes her about 30 seconds to eat. She only gets 1/3 of a cup of grain a feeding, just enough to keep her happy while everyone else gets their quarts of food. She's also never been a bucket banger, a horse that makes massive noise with their food pan in the hope of attracting more food. For her to ignore a person in favor of an empty food bucket is incredibly out of character. Even after I opened the stall door and called to her, the food bucket took priority over me. Well, OBVIOUSLY, I needed to go find out what was so interesting.
Inside was a baby mouse, large enough to be covered in fine fur and somewhat mobile, but small enough that its eyes were still shut. It wobbled around blindly inside the bucket. Whenever it huddled down and sat still, Tisa would smack the bucket and make it roll around and start moving again.
Now I'm not the type to let my horse torture a baby mouse to death. I gathered it up, put it in an unused pail and thoroughly searched her stall for other random critters. Nothing. Just one small lost baby mouse.
By this time I was risking being late to my lesson, so I tacked up and spent an hour being tortured* by my instructor. After the lesson, I walked Tisa out to dry her off. All told, we were out of the stall for about 90 minutes. I put her back in and put my tack away. Paid my instructor. Came back to say goodnight. Tisa was staring at her food bucket.
Sure enough, inside it was another baby mouse. Now her bucket is just a triangular black plastic pail mounted to the wall. Its not like there's anywhere to hide in there. I gathered the mouse up and went to have Words(tm) with the other riders present. I'm all for pranks but baby mice are poor form. On the way out of the stall, I found another mouse on the floor. Mouse count, three. Explanations, zero.
After talking to the other girls, it became pretty clear that none of them were involved. Most wouldn't even look at what I was carrying, let alone touch one. Who knew horse women were such prisses.
That led me to decide that I had the first known instance of it raining baby mice in New England, if not the world. So into Tisa's stall I went and, sure enough, there was an open spot high up in the wall where the hayloft ended. It just happened to line up with Tisa's feed bucket. Okay, more proof for the raining mice theory.
I wandered down to the house in search of Wayne, the barn owner's husband and keeper of all useful tools. I was in need of a step ladder to get into the hayloft. Wayne, intrigued, agreed to help me in my search for the source of the mouse rain.
We got up into the hayloft. Now the hayloft in this building isn't used for storage. There are two barns on the property and the other one is much more convient to pull a truck into. All the hay and most of the shavings are stored in that hayloft and this one is normally ignored. It hadn't had anything or one in it in a very long time according to the the 1/2 inch of dust on the floor. On the other hand, it didn't have anything BUT dust in it either. No hay, no shavings. You could see the entire floor area and there was nothing in there. I was hoping for an obvious nest somewhere that we could put the little mice into but no luck.
We worked our way over to the area above Tisa's stall and found .... lots of spiral patterns in the dust. Circles and circles and three little paths leading to the edge of the hole above Tisa's stall. No paths leading from anywhere else. No paths into the spirals, just the three leading out. The roof above that entire area is solid plywood, so they didn't drop down from points higher. It was as though three baby mice had spontaneously appeared in the middle of the floor in the hayloft.
Okay, so my piece of weirdness wasn't actually a rain of baby mice, it was the spontaneous generation of baby mice. I had thought that theory was abandoned in Victorian times but I still don't have another explanation. Baby mice appeared where none had been previously and proceded to fall into my horse's food bucket. Unless baby mice can fly, I'm stuck with spontaneous generation.