I have seen a few double-dilute foals with unusual dark patches recently, so I was happy when Jess Aisthorpe gave me permission to run the images she took of her day-old cream dilute filly. The patches on her body are not from being wet or dirty, but are a deeper color than the rest of her coat.

The largest area of dark hair covers her left shoulder, but she has smaller patches on both sides of her body and her face.

Her markings are very similar to those found on the smoky cream Morgan, Prairie Hill Apache. To date, the other examples of these darker cream patches that I have seen have all been on black-based double creams. The color on Jess’ filly is not yet known, but she has a buckskin sire and a grey dam with a palomino grandsire, so it is possible that she is a perlino or smoky cream.

It would be interesting to know if markings like these are visible – and a pronounced – when the horse is mature. So far the examples I have seen were all in very young foals. If you have experience with double-dilutes with markings like these, please share them. It would be interesting to see more examples, especially if there are both foal and adult photos.