Quarter House Alpacas
As the nights draw in our attention is once again focused on bottle-feeding a white cria, and it is interesting to note the contrast between Hosta last year and Tonto this year. You may recall that Tonto stopped putting on weight altogether and we had to start supplementing his Mum’s milk. Although it had been hard to feed Hosta initially, she soon got the hang of it and at night she would run up to one of us and drink the whole bottle of goat’s milk, then disappear amongst the herd. Tonto is another matter altogether.
Even after several weeks, he still has to be caught and held while he takes the bottle. We use an old shepherd’s crook to catch him, though he doesn’t put up too much of a struggle any more. Luckily he usually stays very close to his mum, and because she is our lovable friendly Philly, she doesn’t often run away, as many of the others would do in the dark.
Once caught, he’s done everything he could to make it as hard as possible to feed him. He wriggles, and clamps his mouth on the teat, so that it was taking up to half an hour to give him half a litre, and half of that would dribble down his chin. He is slowly getting better, but is a long way behind Hosta, but maybe that’s because he still has his mum around, or maybe it’s just because he’s a boy. The important thing is that he is at last putting on weight steadily, even if he’s still behind the other four cria who are around 30 Kilos now.
The serious lack of rain up until the first week of October was taking its toll on the grass, and we had been forced to open up the fields we were trying to rest, so that they could try and find some more grass. Luckily, Alpacas are habitually used to making the best of very poor scrubby vegetation through their origins in the Andes, so they are very efficient at extracting the necessary nutrients from it, and they don’t seem to be suffering a loss of condition. The heavy rain in mid-October has made a big difference, and the fields suddenly looked green again instead of brown. We’ll have to see how they fare through the Winter after such poor growth, but I can see we’ll be getting through a lot of hay this time. At least that was good this Summer.
The next big event will be the ultra-sound scanning of the mated mums to check who is pregnant. Despite the ‘spitting-off’ testing we did, this always gives us a few surprises, and even after testing, it is possible for a cria to be lost or ‘re-absorbed’. It’s always worth knowing where we stand at this stage however, as we’re already looking forward to next year’s births.