Alpacas are not only creatures multiplying in Popham’s barn this year!!

Here’s the promised photos of the latest crias. The fawn girl giving birth in the barn was a sensible old girl as it was really bucketing down outside when she decided to come in and deliver in the dry. It took us all by surprise and as you can see Felicia was able to give a helping hand. A beautiful fawn boy. The two little white girls are not twins but you could easily be mistaken as they are identical and share the same mum alot of the time. We have called them Melody and Symphony.

I can’t believe its been a week since my last post, there has just been so much happening, crias been born and we’ve finally started our mating season. So much so that I haven’t been able to get the Nikon out and get some pictures onto the blog. We’ve got this week off from our real jobs so  today and tomorrow we are doing mating trips so as to catch a few things up and then we plan to have a few quiet days. Victoria is back from her European travels short of money so, apart from all the little things that need doing including poo picking!! I’ll have her out there with the Nikon over the next few days and hopefully I’ll be able to bring you some of the latest cria pics. So watch this space, we’ll be back.

We were at Liskeard Show on Saturday and the day was totally washed out by the weather. It was a shame as it is a lovely local show and we often get quite a bit of interest there but not this time. We even lost one gazeebo having to chuck it into the skip after a pole snapped.

Just thought I’d post a couple of pictures of our latest crias today.

Here’s the promised pics of the latest two cria, a fawn huacaya  male and every one’s favourite so far, a chocolate brown suri female who is far too friendly for her own good.

We had a scare with Mundevhu again on Saturday. After frightening us last week with heat stroke we decided to shear him on Saturday. Now this is the first time we have cria sheared and will probably be the last. We put him back with his mum afterwards and she flatly refused to accept him. We kept them penned for a few hours to no avail, tried them back in the field where she just kept running away from him. I know he’s well grown but I wouldn’t want to wean him, he’s not even 4 months old yet. So we left them together in a pen all day yesterday with Sarah in charge while we went down to LLama land. Cleverly Sarah found that if you fed Dancer (the mum) by hand, this distracted her enough for Mundevhu to nip in underneath and have a quick drink. We have persevered with this today and I’m glad to say she has accepted him and they’re back together in the field now. He does look gorgeous sheared though.

We took three boys down to LLamaland for their Open day yesterday. Once again they were impressively busy, must have had a thousand people on the day. The rain kept off till it was time to pack up which meant that of course we got soaked.

I never thought I’d be glad to see the rain but what a relief today has been We had the alpacas that haven’t been shorn in the barn yesterday with fans on them to keep cool. They must have thought they were the new show team. Mundevhu gave us a fright with a touch of heat stroke, a litre of fluids and electrolytes got him back to normal. The little female cria is still only suckling off two back teats but has started putting on weight at last. We are still topping her up with lamblac but will probably start cutting that down shortly. Amongst all of this we’ve had a fantastic dark brown female suri, exactly what we wanted. ( a girl….yippee). Oh and another boy !!!. ( a white one) both are doing great but are a bit wet today so I’ll get the camera out over the weekend. Thats seven boys and three girls so far, so the tide is beginning to turn. Certainly been a busy few days and that doesn’t include the mating run today or the day job!!