Don’t forget if you’re in the Truro area on Sunday to come and visit us at Llama Land’s Open Day. We will have alpacas there along with some of our Cornish alpaca garments which we have recently had made by a lovely lady in Lostwithiel.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Llamas as well. ( An alpaca that can look you in the eye…scary thought).

Another beautiful girl arrived today, third of the week. Dam that means another celebration! Demelza delivered a lovely darkfawn/light brown cria without problems. The first group of cria tended to the whiter end of the spectrum. These girls born this week, two dark fawn and a light fawn are a welcome relief.

This is a picture of Fantasia’s cria born on Tuesday. Gorgeous !!

Took this picture of our swallows nest in the barn yesterday just in time as they have flown the nest today. Life will be a bit easier for the parents now as I reckon they were doing a feeding trip every three or four minutes during the day. Hard work !

Yesterdays crias survived the night well and were joined today by another one. Angarrick gave birth to a light fawn boy without any difficulties. So the second batch of babies is now well on the way with these three. The first batch we will keep separate now. It makes it easier to spot problems in smaller groups.

This is a picture of a very proud Angarrick and her baby. Cria coats in July !!!!

Good news to report. Two beautiful female cria were born today. Victoria, our daughter, was left in charge for the day and ended up having a very busy one. The first cria was out of Fantasia, she is a stunner, solid dark fawn and arrived with no problems at all. The second cria was out of Chica who was a maiden. Victoria had to assist a little bit which will be good training for her future career. The baby is a solid white/light fawn girl and at the moment has more purple spray on her than white fleece!! We’ve brought them all into the barn as it has started pouring down so I’ll let them dry off for a while and then get some pictures onto the blog.

Time for a celebration…

Unfortunately we had a still born today. Biscuit went into labour mid morning showing all the usual signs but after an hour it became apparent that all was not well so Felicia checked her out and reckoned things were definately wrong and suspected a twist in the uterus so we called the vet. He turned up and examined her and cofirmed Felicia’s suspicions except that it was a 360 degree torsion. I had to find a plank of wood and with me standing on that which was holding the cria in place, the others rotating the female 90 degress at a time untill the torsion was corrected. The vet then pulled the cria out but unfortunately it was dead, a little white boy.

These things happen, anyway we have milked mum and saved her colostrum, given her loads of jabs and she is eating away merrily now. Hopefully the next blog will be a bit more cheerfull!

Well we are now a protection zone and will soon be getting a call from the vets to say our vaccine is ready for collection. This thought does concern me as the reports doing the rounds are not encouraging, the latest was from Dawn Macormick who brought an alpaca here for mating yesterday. One of her females became very poorly shortly after the vaccine was administered and hasn’t really recovered fully yet.

On the face of it we have obviously got to go ahead and vaccinate, as the BAS say “don’t hesitate, vaccinate”, but I suspect I’ll have a few sleepless nights.

We weighed Georgina’s cria again today and unfortunately he has not gained at all, even though we have seen him regularly feeding from mother. Felicia deciced he can’t suck properly and on close examination we have found out why. He has the most undersot jaw we have ever seen. It must be 2cm undershot and obviously this is causing him difficulty when trying to hold onto the teat. so we will continue with the supplementary feeding as much as possible and hope he makes it. This again makes you question the value of outside matings, especially to unproven show winners!!

All is well with the crias. Josh’s foot has healed well, though he does look a bit strange with one purple foot. My attempts at a hernia correction have failed dismally. we’ll just have to make sure it sorts itself out otherwise it might be a job for the vet. We’ve stopped giving supplementary feeds to Georgina’s cria and he is holding his weight. Probably give him a name now which hopefully won’t be the kiss of death!!

Chica is still holding on to her pregnancy, 11 months 3 weeks now, she is such a tiny thing you begin to wonder if there is enough room.

We have got a few empty females running around now. We plan to start mating in mid-July. This is the first time we have delayed things like this. The idea is to free up the period over spring and early summer so that we can both enjoy the shows etc. The stud males are sitting in their field looking across at the females and wondering whats happened. They’ll soon be busy enough. This is the first year we are going to have Alamo and Verdello cria from quality females in a large enough number to make real comparisons. The Alamo cria so far look the best we’ve had to date but the next few due are Verdello cria so it should be interesting. The outside mating results have so far been very poor, infact the worst in the paddock. I guess the lesson is don’t go chasing show winners, wait for their progeny!!