New Baby

These are the last photos on the blog for a while as we are going away for the weekend and then Mike is going to Thailand for ten days and taking the family camera with him. I will still try and keep up with the news but no pictures.

Wouldn't you know it!! We have been waiting for cria to be born for weeks and finally this one decided to pop out at 12.20 this afternoon. The pictures were taken at 12.45. She is a very strong girl and was on her feet within half an hour and suckling in just over an hour from birth.

BathTime

It has been another lovely sunny day and we have been making the most of it. We had to get the alpacas in to a catch pen to check them over and they took the opportunity to have a communal dust bath.

Sunshine all Day

Well what beautiful weather we are having. Alpacas have been sunbathing and rolling in dust baths to show their appreciation.

Pedro has told me in confidence that he will not allow his recent success to change his life in any way. This is just as well as he has to live with nine other males at the moment and they just would not tolerate celebrity tantrums.

He will back to work tomorrow courting and ravishing young females.

Emilia is equally unmoved by stardom and is certainly not aiming for a size zero figure judging by the way she barges her way to the feeding trough in the mornings.

Pretty much back to routine today, but much more pleasant doing it all in the sun. Mike has taken our camper van to be MOT'd today so I have been on my own. He is going to Thailand on Sunday but my neighbour has kindly offered to come in during the ten days he is away to help with paddock cleaning and give me a hand with other things if I need it.

She brings her young yellow labrador round to train on our dog agility equipment and normally repays me with beautiful home made cakes. http://www.alpacas-for-sale.co.uk/studservices.html

North Somerset Show

All went very well. Mike helped me to load up the alpacas going to the show and it only took about an hour and twenty minutes to get there.

The show was very well attended and there was plenty of interest from the general public who came to watch the judging of llamas and alpacas and talk to the breeders competing.

I met up with Lynsey Skinner of Dreamfield Alpacas and her friend Camilla. My friends Pauline and Pete came along.

Our part of the world did very well as three of Lynsey's alpacas gained places including a first and reserve champion.

Laurel Farm also had an excellent result with Laurel's Lady Emilia winning a 2nd place and Laurel's Don Pedro won his class and was show Champion.

Another friend, Paul, took photos and I hope to put them on the blog in a day or two.

Mike had a busy day and although very pleased at our show results, was gutted when I got home as my border collie, Millie, had gone missing. He had searched high and low and checked everywhere she might have accidently been shut in.

We let the alpacas out of the trailer and I went in search. We decided to have one more look and then call the police - then, of course, she turned up. I went down to the bottom paddocks and called her and she happily trotted out from between the hedge and ditch and was really pleased to see me. Mike was so relieved I thought he was going to collapse. Millie was completely oblivious to the worry she had caused and had probably been having a whale of a time and either could not hear Mike calling or was too absorbed to notice.

Pre Show Day

I am off to the North Somerset Show tomorrow. Unfortunately I shall be going on my own as we have 4 females all due or over due so one of us has to stay at home to keep an eye on things.

Mike has been away at a dog agility competition all weekend, so he will take over from me here.

The vet phoned to say that the skin scrapes she viewed under the microscope showed no sign of mites or any other likely cause for the irritation which is causing the alpaca to either rub off or lose her fleece coverage on her ears and nose. She is going to speak to another vet in the practice whose expertise is dermatology. In the meantime I am continuing with her high zinc diet, she has had a vitamin injection and I am considering returning to the Cam Rose regimen again.

The female who was thin seems better since she has been on medication, although she is not enjoying having it every day and is becoming more difficult to catch. I try to make it as quick and stress free as possible, but with the best will in the world force feeding cannot be a very nice experience.

Having done all the chores - changed the water, topped up hay, and fed everyone, I have printed out the list of things to take to the show. I was hoping to show 12 alpacas but David and Mike cannot come so it will be just my friend, Pauline, and me and as there are only two classes we will only be able to show 4 animals. We will still take six with us which is the maximum our Rice horsebox will take comfortably. We did squeeze 8 in for the Bristol spring show but it was very tight as some of them are nearly fully grown now.

We have been looking out for a Stock Trailer and are hoping to buy one in time for the Devon and the Bath & West Shows. If anyone out there knows of a good second hand preferably Ifor williams livestock trailer, 12ft with dividers, please let us know. We will then have an old but refurbished Rice Horse box for sale.

We will bring all the alpacas who are going to be shown in to the barn tonight for ease of loading in the morning.

The two cria who were born at the beginning of April have been coming in each night because the weather has been so cold and uncertain, but they are very strong and porky now so they and their mothers and the other soon to be mums can go into a paddock with a shelter over night from now on. We will move them back into the paddock near the house in the mornings so we can observe them and watch for birthing problems and of course natural births.http://www.alpacas-for-sale.co.uk/studservices.html

Vitamin Injections

This was supposed to go on the blog yesterday but there was something stopping my emails and web access. In time honoured fashion, I rebooted and tried again today. Everything seems to be back to normal.

Our son, David, paid his Friday visit to the farm to help.

The UK is at a fairly high latitude so in the winter the days become very short. Llamas and alpacas have evolved at low latitutes (mainly on the Altiplano in South America) where at all times of the year there are long hours of daylight and bright dry skies too. The UK's dark dismal winters do not provide sufficient sunlight for the production of Vitamin D in the skin, especially in young animals who are still growing. It is therefore good practice to inject them with Vitamin D at least three or four times during each winter.

We imported quite a few of our alpacas, and as they have not been bred in the UK we tend to give them vitamin D all the year round - about every sixe weeks in the winter and every three months in the summer.

Unfortunately it is no longer possible to obtain injectable Vitamin D in the Uk and so we have to import it from the States. We ordered it early in April and due to a mix up with the address it still had not arrived by Thursday.

After his welcome cup of coffee we had decided that there was very little actual husbandry needed so David was all set to start moving the wood left over from the intensive hedge laying that took place last winter. He was just about to hitch up the trailer when a delivery arrived - guess what? The vitamins. The change of plan did not take long to initiate.

We put up the injections and brought the alpacas in paddock by paddock for their dose of liquid sunshine.

The pictures show David bringing in the alpacas with his sheep dog, Jax. Jax is used to herding their flock of Wiltshire Horn sheep and find alpacas a bit confusing. They do not always run ahead of her. Sometimes they won't move at all and sometimes they will turn round and appear to be thinking "what on earth is that dog doing?"

Although we have six dogs, we do not routinely use them to move the alpacas because they are so easy going that it is just as easy to call them and just walk slowly behind them. They are quite happy to mooch along that way. We just put an arm out here or there and they seem to know where to go.

If we need them to go in to the barn we sometimes get Millie our smoke working sheepdog. She can bring them all the way from the furthest paddock and feed them in to the barn with only minimum help from us.

Anyway we did not start until about 11.00 a.m. and they were all done and out in their paddocks again by lunchtime. Not bad for 40 alpacas and two people.http://www.alpacas-for-sale.co.uk/index.html

Vet's visit

We have had concerns about one of our white alpacas, Audrey. She had a beautiful white male cria in September last year but she became very thin and to give her a chance to regain her weight we weened her cria off a little early. We also noticed that her teeth had grown over long and we wondered whether this might effect her digestion so when Colin our shearer came along to scan the pregnant females in March, he cut her teeth down so that they met her top pad thus unabling her to bite off the grass more easily.

She seems to eat just like the others and gets a supplement of vitamins and minerals but she is still very thin. Jenny, the vet, came this afternoon and checked Audrey over. Her stomach seems to be working very fast and she is passing unformed faeces, but she is not scouring, and there is no obvious reason. Jenny took a sample away for analysis and in the meantime we are to drench (give by mouth) her every day for five days with a gut flora stimulant. This should improve her gut flora and hopefully return her to normal health.

We also asked Jenny to look at one of our black alpacas who has had some skin problems which seemed to be getting better. Last week we were pleased to see that the bald patch on her nose was growing over very well and hair was returning to her ears. This week we were shocked to see that she had rubbed off most of the fleece on both sides of her nose and looked worse than ever. Jenny took some skin scrapes and is going to look under the microscope to let us know if she can detect any wild life in the skin that needs attention - or any other reason for this distressing condition.

Alpacas are prone to skin problems and we have followed all the known advice to avoid them so it will be very interesting to find out if there is anything else we can do. The good news is that that Charmain, the alpaca in question, seems very fit and well in every other respects, even if she looks a little moth eaten.http://www.alpacas-for-sale.co.uk/index.html