Quarter House Alpacas
April 2009
The welcome blast of warm weather persuaded us to wean the cria at the start of April. The first few days are always rather trying, as they run up and down the fence all day bleating plaintively and trying to catch a glimpse of their mums. The morning and evening feeds provide a distraction for them, and Humph, Hebe and Hendrix had already begun to eat some of the dried food with their mums, so they suddenly had free access without having to compete with the big ones. Hosta and Hamish had not yet sampled the dried food, but within a day Hosta had tried it and now tucks in with the others. A week later however, Hamish has still not shown much interest even though he’s sniffed it a few times. He is probably the slowest to ‘let go’ of the attachment to his mum (Meg), but Meg’s last cria was just the same. They are all eating the new grass with relish so we’re not too concerned just yet.
We had decided to wean all 5 cria together initially, and this seems to have worked well and they are now functioning as a small herd, and playing and grazing togther. The plan is to split off the 3 boys soon and put them with our two gelded males, Dali and Doogle, but to separate the two stud males who can get a bit boisterous with little ones around. We’re hoping that Hosta and Hebe will ‘bond’ together, so that Hosta is not too isolated when they both go back to the Mums herd. Hebe is from a very strong line including her mum Kim and sisters Bonnie and Twiggy who all tend to have close ties, plus a keen appetite, which is very noticeable in Humph who is Bonnie’s cria, and definitely the greediest of the five.
Having done our diary calculations we decided that we have time to give the whole herd a dose of Flukicide against liver-fluke as there have been some cases reported recently in Llamas and Alpacas in this region. Unfortunately, this was rather complicated when Jane broke her ankle and put herself out of action for some time. Luckily we were able to call on the help of another Alpaca breeder in Smallhythe and applying the drench went very smoothly, with no after-effects this time; thanks Robert.
The next big event once the weaning is over will be this year’s shearing in May. We’ve been in touch with our regular shearers from New Zealand, who fly over in April and spend their Winter travelling around the UK just shearing Alpacas. It is a specialist skill, not quite like shearing sheep, so not something we can do ourselves. More about that next time.
Don’t forget that if you have access to a computer you can catch up with previous Criary Diary entries at our website www.qhalpacas.co.uk, where there are also lots of pictures of all the characters in the herd.