Foaling Kit Checklist (Printable PDF): What to Have Ready Before the Mare's Window Opens (2026)

By Brian Bickell, who raises paint and quarter horses at Bickell Ranches in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

A foaling kit is a box that gets assembled in daylight, in November, by somebody who is not tired. That is its entire design brief. Everything in it exists because at two in the morning in February nobody is going to find a clean towel, a working flashlight, or the veterinarian's after-hours number by looking for it.

This is a supply and records checklist, not foaling advice. What to do when a foaling is going wrong is a conversation with the attending veterinarian and nothing on this page substitutes for it. What a checklist can do is make sure the things that decision depends on, light, a phone that works, a trailer that is ready, and a written record of what actually happened and when, are already in place before the window opens.

A record-keeping guide, not veterinary guidance. No drug, dose, or threshold appears below on purpose. The medical contents of a foaling kit, and every judgment about when to intervene, belong to the attending veterinarian who knows the mare and the operation.

Timing: Build the Kit Against the Safe Date

Foaling is a window, not a date. A mare carries roughly eleven months, and the useful planning anchor is not the average but the early edge of the window, the safe date, because that is the first day a foal could reasonably arrive. A kit assembled for the average date is a kit that is two weeks late on the mare who runs early, and every band has one.

The horse gestation calculator turns a cover date into the window without any arithmetic. Enter the last cover of the cycle she settled on and it returns the safe date, the expected date, and the upper edge of normal. On a book of any size, working that out per mare on a phone in the barn is how the dates end up wrong; the Broodmare Board carries the window for every mare in the band on one screen, along with how far off it is, so the order the mares are going to foal in is a list rather than a memory.

The practical rule on a working place is that the kit goes together when the first mare of the season is a month out from her safe date. Every mare after her is covered by the same box, restocked as it gets used.

The Foaling Area

The stall or the pen is the first item on the list, and it is the one that takes the most lead time to fix.

• A clean, well-bedded stall, or the paddock the operation actually intends to use, decided in advance rather than at midnight
• A door or gate that opens wide enough to get a mare and a foal through together, and that one person can open with their hands full
• Light that comes on from outside the stall, and a second light source that does not depend on the barn circuit
• A camera or monitor with a screen wherever the person on watch is going to be, tested on the actual network before the season
• An outlet or a run of extension cord, checked, with nothing chewable in reach
• Water the mare can reach and a full bucket that has not been standing for a week
• A muck bucket, a heavy trash bag for the placenta, and a container with a lid if the veterinarian will want to see it
• Fly control and heat appropriate to the month and the building, both fire-safe

For the Mare

• A tail wrap, and a spare
• A bucket, warm water, and mild soap
• Clean towels, more than seems reasonable
• A halter and lead hanging on the stall front, not in the tack room
• Shoulder-length obstetrical sleeves and lubricant, kept sealed
• Disposable gloves
• A watch or a clock with a face that can be read at a distance in bad light

For the Foal

• Dry towels, kept separate from the mare towels so there is no hunting
• Whatever navel treatment the attending veterinarian has specified, in a small clean cup, with the cup in the box
• A luggage scale or sling scale, and a sling or a soft feed sack to weigh in
• A foal halter for later in the week, sized and already in the box
• A clean blanket or towel for a cold night
• A labeled empty slot for anything else the veterinarian has told the operation to keep on hand, so the slot reads as empty if nobody filled it

For the People

The half of the kit that is not about horses is the half that gets skipped, and it is the half that decides how the night goes.

• A headlamp, because both hands are going to be busy, plus spare batteries
• A phone, charged, with a charger in the barn rather than in the house
• The phone tree, written on the wall in letters readable at three in the morning: the attending veterinarian after-hours number, a backup veterinarian, the hauler, and a second set of hands who has agreed in advance to answer
• The truck fueled and the trailer hitched or hitchable, with current travel paperwork already in the cab, because the worst night to find a flat trailer tire is the night the decision to haul gets made
• A payment method that works at a clinic at four in the morning
• Something to write on: a clipboard and a pen in the box, or the phone if the record is going straight into an app
• Coffee, a chair, and a plan for who is relieving whom, on a book big enough to need one

What to Write Down at the Foaling

The supplies are half the kit. The other half is the record, and it is the half nobody replaces afterward, because the details are gone by the following morning.

Everything below is a fact to capture as it happens, with a clock time next to it. None of it is a threshold and none of it implies anything should happen by a particular hour. What is normal, and what is not, is the attending veterinarian call.

Capture	The note that makes it useful
Stage one behavior noticed	Clock time, and what was seen
Water broke	Clock time
Delivery	Clock time
Presentation	Described plainly, as observed
Foal first stood	Clock time
Foal first nursed	Clock time
Placenta passed	Clock time, and whether it appeared intact
Foal sex	Colt or filly
Markings and color	Enough detail to match the registry description and the photographs
Birth weight	If there is a scale
Anything the veterinarian said	Verbatim, including anything to check again later

Two of those rows matter more than their length suggests. The clock times are the record a veterinarian reads first on a call the next day, and they are the only part of the night that is genuinely unreconstructable. The markings and color feed the registration application months later, and the description written the first week is the one that matches the photographs taken the first week, before a foal sheds and changes.

Photographs belong in the same sweep. Both sides, the front, and the face, in the best light available, taken the same day and filed with the foal's record rather than left in a camera roll. The registry wants them, and the foal registration paperwork guide covers what else the application is going to ask for.

Where the Record Goes

A clipboard on the stall door is a perfectly good way to capture a foaling, and it is the wrong place to store one. Paper written at three in the morning ends up in a tack room drawer, and the times on it stop being findable about the time somebody actually needs them.

In HorseBook the foaling gets recorded on the mare: the date, the foal sex, the presentation, and the early-care notes, and recording it closes out her foaling window on the calendar. The foal becomes its own horse, linked back to the dam and the sire, so the family tree connects and the foal starts accumulating a record of its own from day one. Every completed foaling also feeds her Gestation history card, which shows the earliest, the average, and the latest she has actually carried, with a row per foaling behind the numbers. After two or three seasons, foal watch on that mare runs on what she does rather than on a textbook figure.

The whole mare-side timeline, cycles through covers, pregnancy checks, foaling, and progeny, is on every HorseBook plan on both the web dashboard and the iPhone app. The longer walk through what to capture at each stage is in foaling records and mare tracking.

Same Kit, Smaller Band

None of this changes shape for one mare. The same box, the same phone tree on the wall, the same clock times written down. A one-mare operation gets the advantage of being able to watch her properly and the disadvantage of never having done it before, which is exactly the case where the written record is worth the most: the person who foals out twenty mares a year has a pattern to compare against, and the person foaling out their first does not.

The box costs an afternoon in the fall. The night it gets used, it is the only afternoon that matters.

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Brian Bickell is the founder of HorseBook and raises paint and quarter horses at Bickell Ranches in Stillwater, Oklahoma. This article covers supplies and record keeping, not veterinary care.