Quarter House Alpacas
February 2009
Our little orphaned cria Hosta has continued to grow very well over the last month or so, though at around 35 kilos she’s not so little any more. Every evening she bravely leaves the herd to come part of the way to meet me to get her nightcap of warm goat’s milk when she sees the torch making its way across the fields. She is still drinking 3 half-litre bottles each day, and we’ve been bottle-feeding for 3 months now, which makes her 6 months old, and we are trying to work out the best way to wean her and the other 4 cria, Hebe, Hamish, Hendrix and Humph. As Hosta no longer has a mum, weaning may just be a matter of gradually reducing the amount of milk, and the number of feeds. We certainly won’t do that until the bad weather is over and the grass is starting to grow again, as they need their nutrition to get them through the cold nights. We noticed a few weeks ago that some of the cria had stopped putting on weight, and that we were getting through huge amounts of hay, so we opened up another field for them and gave the mums some extra feed supplements (Alfalfa and flaked Sugar Beet). The hay consumption has gone down and the weights have gone up again, so it was worth keeping a field untouched for them, even though the grass looks pretty unappetising just now. Because Alpacas have traditionally lived on the high mountain slopes of the Andes, they are very good at living off poor grazing so they can perhaps cope better with the grass (and the weather) at this time of the year.
We have started to think about the plan for weaning the cria, as it is a tricky business. We will definitely have to wean the boys from their mums. To do this we have to make sure that the 3 little boys are as far away from their mums as possible, as they will be very stressed. It is risky however to put them in with our male studs, Monty and Marmite, though our gelded males Dali and Doogle (the Suri) will be fine with them, so that means splitting off the two studs to an adjacent field.
If we do wean the girls we will have to split off Hebe (from her mum Kim) and Hosta, then again we will need another field well away from the mums, and the studs. We wouldn’t want to put the two girl crias in a field on their own, as Alpacas always prefer to be in a herd, so we might also need to split off some of the younger non-pregnant girls such as Lulu, to accompany the 2 cria. It all gets very complicated, and working out the combinations of fields that have shelter and maximum distances from the mums is a bit like a Sudoku puzzle. We also need to be particularly careful not to stress Hosta too much after her ordeal, so we might just leave the girls with the mums, (something we have done in the past ) and hope that Kim, (who is not pregnant this year), will naturally wean Hebe,. We’ll have to see when the weather improves.