The QuarterHouse Quarterly (formerly Criary Diary) Spring 2010

It’s Spring at last, and in keeping with the tradition of Spring-Cleaning, we are transforming the Criary Diary into the QuarterHouse Quarterly. This was a suggestion of the new OoO editorial team, which gives us a chance to go into greater depth about your favourite local Alpacas, and add a few pictures. It will only be once per season, but we hope you’ll enjoy it just as much.

There can’t be many of us who will be sad to see the end of this past winter; we’ve certainly had enough rain, frost and snow to keep us going for a while. Hopefully, it has killed off a few of the unwanted midges and other insects that were taking advantage of our mild winters. It doesn’t seem to have affected the rabbit population too much, as I spotted two discarded kits before the end of February, and the ducks seemed to be nesting too.

The alpacas will certainly be pleased to see the grass growing again. Even though we have rotated them through the fields, the very dry summer didn’t really give the grass a chance to come back before the ground cooled down and the growth stopped. That and the snow meant that we used more than twice as much hay as usual, and at the height of the snow we were putting out 3 bales a day. Luckily our regular supplier had just enough to spare which we hope will keep us going until the new hay is ready in July. We supplemented the hay with some chopped Alfalfa, and our ‘Grand Dame’ Fleur, regularly enjoyed soaked sugar-beet flakes. Fleur has also been wearing a nice padded coat all winter and luckily she seems to have come through OK, along with her cria TinTin who is already bigger than her. He has an incredibly soft fleece, but it attracts anything that moves so it’s covered in hay, twigs and heaven-knows what. It will be great fun when we come to ‘skirt’ his fleece!

The other cria are all doing well too; Tonto continues to feed from his mum Philly, which has helped to maintain her recently achieved trim figure! With 3 white alpacas on the farm now it is getting increasingly difficult to tell the difference between them from a distance. It has made us appreciate the value of specialising in all shades from fawn to black so that we can easily tell them apart. The shearing is planned for May once again, and we have booked our usual New Zealand shearers and now we’re just praying for a dry day. We still have some of the previous years’ wool and carded fleece available, and our scarves are now on sale in Rye Art Gallery.

We’ve been resting some fields after harrowing and manuring them (with well-rotted Alpaca poo of course), ready for the weaning. Planning for weaning in March/April is very complicated as we have to keep the weanlings well away from their mums, and the studs away from the girls, and from the cria, and with our orchard in use for a neighbour’s lambing so we have to do a lot of juggling. It will all work out fine in the end, though we’ll have some very unhappy weanlings for a few days at least. We have to wait for decent weather to wean, otherwise it can put too much stress on them, even though they should have stopped drinking milk by now.

The other calculation is when to fit in their annual Heptovac injections, along with BlueTongue and Ivermectin (for worms), as each injection has to be spaced several weeks apart. We have to inject the Heptovac into the pregnant females in the last 4-6 weeks before they give birth so that the immunity is passed on, so we have to be very careful with the scheduling. We like to give the BlueTongue vaccination when we are around all day to keep an eye on them, because despite what the official advice says, the whole herd goes very quiet for about 48 hours as if they have a dose of flu. It is interesting that the initial scare about Blue Tongue seems to have faded for the present, so perhaps the injection regime has kept the disease at bay on the continent. We certainly wouldn’t want to be the ones to let it get a foothold here, so we vaccinate despite the worries about side-effects. We recently attended a seminar about bovine TB as it seems that a few Alpacas and Llamas have been known to catch it in some of the ‘hotspot’ areas like the South West and Gloucestershire. Fortunately it’s not prevalent in this area, so we aren’t worried, especially as our herd is very much closed, but we will be extra careful about bringing in any other animals. As we have our own studs, and as many animals as we need for a viable herd, that shouldn’t be a problem for us. It’s interesting to be finding out about something we never gave a thought to 6 years ago before we saw our first Alpaca; there’s always something new to learn about them. It’s also good to be looking forward to some of the things we do know about too, as once more we’re planning for the shearing and births, having put another winter behind us.