A pearl, a seal, and a narwhal... and we're not even in our kayak

Since our last post, we've celebrated Julie's birthday and the 4th of July. The rain finally stopped, and we've been enjoying more traditional Michigan summer weather: hot and sunny.

In contrast, our wanderings out from our ranch this past week brought us to some quite chilly biomes. While tromping slowly through deep snow, we found our biggest, heaviest wild ever, Squiggy.

He's 22 hands tall and just shy of 2500 lbs! He has 3 inches on our previous record holder. The max height for a horse on HI3 is 22.2 hands, 2 inches taller even than Squiggy. That would be one enormous horse!

The downsides of all that bulk: he doesn't move or respond very quickly and has poor stamina. His personality is also far from ideal: skittish and just ornery enough to buck. (And it's a long way down...)

My sisters want to keep him anyway (shocker), impressed by his shiny pearliness as well as his massiveness. I'm still trying to talk them out of it.

Granted, we moved the camera downward a bit for these last two screenshots to make it look more how it would for somebody standing on the ground observing (rather than the default higher-up view), but doesn't Pepsi look tiny? XD

Our second noteworthy horse was this suspiciously large seal brown mare hanging out on the ice crusts. (Most ice biome wilds are small ponies.)

Sure enough!

She's a seal brown Heavy Waler! (And very lost, ha ha.) She doesn't look particularly heavy to me, not after Erglu, but I assume she's built more heavily than other types of Walers - we still need to check in the library. At any rate, we are super pleased to have an Australian breed represented in our herd now, especially a mare as lovely as this one. 

Yay, her performance metrics are great! Quite a nice personality too, aside from her antisocial-ness. 

I don't think I'd ever have pegged her as a lucky find if I'd found her in a biome with horse-sized wilds. She's very well-proportioned, but there's nothing super eye-catching about her conformation that screams "I'm a purebred!" to me the way some do. XD

We caught our third noteworthy horse in a black sands biome on Julie's birthday. It's pretty obvious why we've included her...

And no, that's not appaloosa spotting. They're bend-or spots! 

Despite her nothing-special performance metrics and underwhelming personality, my sisters want to keep her too. *Sighs* I'm trying to talk them out of it, but what made even more of an impact is when "Practical Cat" randomly bucked off Pepsi from a standstill the other day, illustrating that yes, she definitely is ornery enough to buck.

She's built lightly - it's hard to guess from these screenshots that she is 17 hands tall. Bend-or on cremello is not my favorite look. Sort of reminds me of a spotted seal or narwhal.

Even though he was lazy and kind of a sausage, I think I preferred our other pale, extensively bend-or-spotted wild from a while back, Medley.

*Sighs* I think we should keep waiting. We're bound to find a bend-or spotted horse with a pleasant personality eventually.

Of the few wilds we've found so far in July, none have been standouts. However, there is more news on the zorse front. Eleanor and Kite's colt continues to grow like a weed. Here he is as a yearling:

The pair's second foal was born on July 3, a pinto filly! No silver this time, though.

Her brother's going to be taller, but wow, she has way higher genetic stats!

Her personality is more desirable too!

While her body stripes seem even fainter than her brother's, she seems to have more distinct striping on her face than he does. We'll see if that remains true as she gets older.

Foal #3 is now on its way. We're still curious to see if we get more defined stripes, a longer mane, or overo, but hopefully this will be it. We read up on pearl and learned we're not ever going to get a dilute foal from this pairing, since pearl requires pearl from both parents to express if there's no cream involved. (Zebras don't carry pearl, and neither parent has cream.) Too bad Kite didn't fall for a cremello or perlino. XD

Despite the lack of stark contrast between stripes and base coat, I'd be astonished if, by the time the trio grows up, my sisters haven't gotten attached to them all... unless #3 is ornery, solid black, or smaller than Kite. We'll see!