Although it has been 2 months since I last wrote anything, nothing much had happened, until yesterday….
Very excitingly Coca has unpacked and I now have a beautiful cria called Fuego. I did actually make the effort of sourcing a beautiful black alpaca boyfriend for Coca this year in the hope I would get a little black cria (Coca is bay black so I thought it would be a high chance). However, nature had other plans and little Fuego is the spitting image of her granny, Reeya, gingery brown on top, a rose grey face and fawn undercarriage and inside of her legs. She was born, as cria should be, on a beautiful sunny day, with light breeze at about 11:30 in the morning. No help was required, and Fuego was up and staggering about within an hour and feeding in 3. She weighed in at 7.7kg after she had dried off in the sun (alpaca mothers don’t lick their babies dry, it is all done by the power of the sun). Next morning she was happily running round the paddock, testing those very spindly legs out. Poor Coca is absolutely ravenous and ate virtually the whole bag of carrot pieces I had taken up for the whole herd, so the following morning when they all came in for breakfast Coca had a bonus double helping of pellets plus an apple with some blackberries thrown in for good measure – she was a very happy girl and almost inhaled it. In fact, she was so focused on eating she didn’t bat an eyelid when I gathered up Fuego and gave her the next weigh in. This is necessary to ensure that the mother is producing and the cria are actually getting milk in order to grow. As a general rule babies drop a few grams after birth before getting into the swing of this suckling business, however Fuego has already increased to 8.15kg so Coca is obviously doing a very good job.
For the past month I have been “saving a paddock” to provide fresh green grass for when the cria arrives however this has proved a little tricky as most of you may have noticed we have not had any consistent rain for months, although there are a lot of springs around here, this just means I have a strip of green running through each paddock and the rest is brown. The girls are now enjoying this newly opened up lovely green strip of grass, while the boys look on with envy.
In a normal year we are mowing the grass every week as the alpaca can’t keep on top of it, this year we have taken the mower round once – just to take the tops off the weeds to stop them seeding. I have however discovered that alfalfa, the odd pruned branch, blackberries, carrots and apples seem to top them up, so they are all still in good condition. However, on the upside to no rain I have only had to clear the badger wire once all summer!
We have had the annual shear, so all alpacas are looking bald but are somewhat cooler. The downside with the minimal covering does unfortunately mean that they are now more bothered by flies, but I spray them each morning, although you would think I was killing them the way they react. Cusco even managed to kick the fly repellent bottle out of my hand, he really is very grumpy at times. The floof is now mainly packaged up ready for the mill, and I am really looking forward to getting my hands on the yarn produced from Inti, it is his first shearing and his floof is unbelievably soft although this is the one fleece that does need skirting (picking out all the debris from the fleece, which he seems extremely adept at collecting). I am also happy to report that I have had several people ask for fleece, so Jester, Coca and Imogen are all destined for other floof users and I can’t wait to see the results.
I am also now getting the hang of weaving, and managed to purchase a loom on e-bay. It was all very exciting and I have already produced a scarf for a friend using silk and alpaca floof (from Lucha), I was absolutely amazed that my first real attempt actually didn’t look too bad, so I am just in the process of setting up the warp for another go using a more complicated pattern, but I will probably use Jester this time.
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