Earthways Newsbeats

Newsbeats is a fun and informative newsletter about topics in HEART OF A HOOFBEAT and new things happening at Earthways Media as well as on the farm.

Work is still progressing on plans to offer multimedia talks with video, stills, music and sound based on the contents of the book. Talks will be offered around Vancouver and the Fraser Valley later this fall. More information will be added to the Presentations link so please check back frequently.

Chapter notes from Hoofbeats:

Original companions
Chapter Two in the book explores the evolution of horses and how they got their start some 50 million years ago. Back then, they were just the size of small dogs and snuffled around in the undergrowth of ancient subtropical forests feeding on leaves and fruit. So it was interesting to read that a 47 million-year-old primate fossil that has been discovered in the Messel Pit in Germany lived among these tiny animals that are sometimes called the ‘dawn horse’. The scientists named the 20 cm primate fossil ‘Ida’ and she foraged for food alongside the tiny horses, bats, primates, rodents, marsupials and lots of snakes, turtles and birds. Being small was the order of the day back then as the world underwent extreme global warming.

Messel Pit is a mile-wide crater and the site of so many ancient animal remains that scientists call it the Eocene Noah’s Ark. It’s the place where some of the best fossils have been found including sixty nearly complete fossil horses. While the earliest humans didn’t appear on the evolutionary map until some 4 million years ago, they are linked back through time to ancient primates and the origins of Eocene new world monkeys about the time of Ida.

Yukon Horse Exhibit
In Chapters Two and Chapter Ten I talked about the last horse Equus lambei to live in North America before the species became extinct on this continent. E. Lambei grazed the ice-free grasslands of the Yukon 10,000 years ago before disappearing. This summer, the Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse, Yukon, opened the Yukon Horse Exhibit which tells the fascinating story about this long extinct horse whose fossil remains were discovered in 1993 by placer miners at Last Chance Creek in the Klondike Goldfields. If you are travelling to the Yukon, this would be a wonderful exhibit to see.

Notes from Kikkuli Farm:

In August we hosted a TREC Driving competition. This is a three-phase competition which includes a safety presentation, a distance drive and a skills test over obstacles. Most of the drivers had miniature horses and they did a 3 km drive which included a compulsory 0.5 km walk. They had to complete the drive in 27 minutes. The other competitor had a beautiful Connemara pony. The obstacle course was 1300 metres with 10 obstacles which included serpentines, gates, immobility, inclines, declines, rein-back and wheel-in.

There will be plenty more TREC competitions next year for both riders and drivers so check back frequently to the Equestrian link.