s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

The “festive season” saw a great deal of camelid-related activities.

We took the opportunity to take animals walkies on two occasions, once to Battle Hill Farm Forest Park on Boxing Day (the park is about 20 minutes from here- and a good choice as troublesome dogs are forbidden- and shot on site by the ranger!), and on New Year’s Day along the beach at QE Park at Mackay’s Crossing.

For the Boxing Day trip the extra excitement came form the fact that we tried on Hob’s saddle and bags- he did quite well, only occasionally forgetting he was extra-wide and scraping them on bushes and gates. Tam decided to experiment and hooked Opa’s lead to the back of Hob’s saddle, and he followed in train with narry a complaint (well, at the very end they got a bit stroppy when they were tired, could see the trailer, and wanted to eat grass and/or go home).

On New Years day we took 5 of our boys, including the llamas, and met up with a bunch of other camelid owner/breeders at the beach. Two other llamas were there, as were two baby (4 and 6 month) old Suris. Very cute little lads, and so tiny next to the llamas! It seems everyone enjoyed the beach walk very much. Next time I willl give more than 24 hours notice, and hopefully we will have plenty more people along. My goal is 20 camelids for the next beach walk.

We have also had our final two cria for the “first wave.” Jasmine dropped a nice little fawn boy (Copperplate) on December 30th, and then Concetta gave us another boy (5 in a row!) on January 4th (Bookman). We now have about 6 weeks until our second wave of cria is due. If I weren’t still bottle-feeding Marlett, I could relax a bit…

We also sent off three more boys as pets. Jasper, Gungnir and Clarent will now be living in the home-paddock of a 1200 acre S&B farm up in Taihape. I look forward to visiting them at some point in the future.

A lot can happen in a short period. Trust your instincts. Mind your peripheral vision.

I was preparing to head into town this morning, getting into the ute, when I looked up and saw Tessa on the ridge, about 100 meters away. My instincts immediately said something was up. It is not unusual for heavily pregnant females to “act funny” in their last month or so. They groan. They stand in strange postures. They lie down- often in weird positions. They get that “this enormous parasite inside me is squishing my organs and kicking my bladder” look. In this case there was just something different about Tessa, so I went up and checked. Sure enough, she was in labour.

So I call Maggie, as her oldest daughter Maria (age 10) wants to grow up and be a vet, and this is a great time to see something “agricultural” and learn lots.

I go back up to check on Tessa, and while I am staring at her, Evita walks by, with a head sticking out! Seems she is in labour, too!

The two gave birth 10 minutes apart. Though Evita had a head start, Tessa managed to get her baby on the ground first. Maggie and kids arrived a few minutes later- so the kids got to see freshly born alpaca, see a placenta drop, and generally learn lots about newborns. (And they loved it, as far as I can tell.)

Two girls! In ten minutes! Woot!

And I think Tessa’s new cria, Raavi, is probably the cutest cria we have ever had. Her little white boots, they slay me.

But that’s not all. It has been a busy couple of weeks. On Friday the 11th, Sugar (one of Bruce’s animals) dropped a lovely white boy, with the temporary name of “Saccharine”.

Then on Sunday the 13th , Cindy went into labour just as we were finishing up the matings and preparing to shear. It was very endearing, she wanted us there for the birth. She followed us around, and if we both tried to leave, she would hummmm most insistently! She gave birth to a lovely little light fawn girl! A Pinocchio cria of our own!

Then on Wednesday the 16th Boo gave us a brown girl! (Another Fred cria this time.) I ended up having to help pull the little girl out, as Boo didn’t seem to be trying that hard, and the labour had gone on long enough. After losing Yale 18 months ago, I decided to take no chances and began feeding little Marlett plenty of colostrum. In the days that followed, I switched her over to milk, and continue to provide plenty of supplemental nutrition. This will be Boo’s last cria, it’s off to the retirement paddock for her.

And finally, this evening we delivered 3 pet boys to a couple up the coast! Pointer is off to a new life, along with Kusunagi and Ridill. While the place is smaller (only about an acre of paddock for the ‘paca), I hope that the new owners will get in the habit of taking them walkies around the neighborhood. I expect everyone, human and camelid, would find that entertaining!

So, the crazy-time is upon us. Cria are dropping. Dams are being re-mated. And shearing! Yes, we are doing some of our own shearing, so when the weather is fine (which seems a rare occurrence these last few weeks) we try to shear a couple of animals.

On top of this we are also selling animals- using Trade Me once again. You can definitely see that the market has slowed considerably since last year. When we put the advert up last time, we had multiple calls within 24 hours. This time it is days or weeks before calls, and we are getting many more tire-kickers.

That being said, we have sold 3 boys to a couple up the road in Pukerua bay. Contract has been signed, and delivery is just waiting for them to do a bit more work on their place (removing a few ornamental plants that are known to be or might be toxic). We also sold our first female! We delivered Topsy to a lovely woman over in Mangaroa on Tuesday night. And then yesterday Topsy dropped a beautiful little brown girl. Lucky purchaser! She instantly gets a female cria- and a Pinocchio offspring to boot! (His first one! We have 5 more due to him this year, hopefully we will get a few girls, too.)

We also sold some stud services (with Hyouki) to the woman who purchased Topsy. This is also nice new business.

Once we finish shearing our own animals we will probably do some hearing around the district. There used to be 3 local alpaca-shearers. One moved away. Another is not shearing this year, as she is super-busy launching a new business. That leaves Brent, and he is booked solid. Shearing might be a great way to get to know other local breeders, and maybe sell a few stud services, females, or more pet-boys along the way.

It’s currently raining boys.

Courier, born last Friday:

Courier, whose mother’s name means “Travels by night”, has the distinction of being the first ever cria from two “Rampant” parents — Isra and Hyouki. He looks just like his dad !

Baskerville, born two days ago:

Baskerville (Sharon inadvertently picked the name of this one) was born at 10.25 kilos — 6-7 is more usual for us. He’s a *big* baby. Stephen had to give Minnie a bit of help getting him out, and is helping out with the feeding a bit as well, since that’s a bit much for a new mum to keep up with. I swear, he makes me think of those fairy tales where the child “reached the age of twenty years/ when others aged but two”. At 24 hours old, he was already bigger than Wingding and running and playing with the other boys. He’s got a really… odd face for a cria, too. Like, he has smallish ears, and smallish eyes, and this little narrow muzzle with a little black nose — all on his big bullum head (though maybe that’s just because his fleece has started out so long?). I’m not sure what he looks like, but it’s not quite a cria.

Finally, Cotton On (actual name pending), born today:

Cute wee thing, from one of the agisted girls.

Persil’s new boy:

And the first cria from Hyouki, too !

First, we’ve started shearing. No matter how long we’ve been doing this, it always seems to be a surprise how skinny they are under all that fluff. Especially the little ones, who are now all ears and necks and legs:

Before:

After:

One of these things is not like the others…

Plus there’s the “They grow up so fast” factor. Who’d have thought our ugly ducking:

…would turn out so pretty ?

Second, Joy has finally given us a girl ! Meet Tahoma:

It cracks us up, but the little girls like to play dollies with the new baby. This is Gandiva, as far as we can tell, pretending to be Tahoma’s mommy. She came up to Tahoma, sniffed her, sat down next to her, then carefully defended her from the other little girls if they got too close, just like Joy does.

And that is just to generate enough paper to file the consent!

For those of you that are curious, the process of designing our own barn- and then filing a complete building consent application, is still ongoing. About 10 days ago I had another meeting with someone at BCLS (building consents and licensing services). All in all it was an encouraging and productive meeting. He was impressed by the plans I had generated. He wanted a few more figures, and he wanted some of the figures I had done rendered differently, but that is easy enough with a computer.

We will need an engineer to come and look at our slab. Why? Well, all structural components must meet a durability requirement of at least 50 years. Concrete slabs meet that requirement. The problem is, our slab is about 20 years old. So we just need a structural engineer to sign off that it has at least 50 more years of life in it.

But… when going over our plan he noted we had a load-bearing wall without sufficient support beneath. By code, to put serious weight onto concrete it must be at least 200mm thick and have 2x 12mm reinforcing rods in it. That portion of the slab, while plenty thick, didn’t have reinforcing rods. Now, I could juggle the design to move the load-bearing wall 1.5 meters onto a reinforcing “beam” built into the slab (which is extra thick and has the 2 x 12mm rods). But that got us thinking, why not approach the problem with a blank sheet of paper.

All along our designs have looked at the barn as a 3 bay structure, along the lines of the so-called “American Style” barn (http://www.fairdinkumsheds.co.nz/store.php?cPath=1).

But our reinforcing beam runes right down the middle of the slab, so now we are looking at design options that treat it as two halves, rather than 3 thirds. Hopefully we can get a design we like done and approved soon. I am getting better and faster at generating barn designs using sketchup, with all this practice.

It is very important that ins and outs are kept separate.

On Tuesday the 15th California Girl, one of the agisted animals, dropped a stillborn cria about 10 weeks early. I might not have noticed with the girls on the back hill, but she was separated from the herd, and staying in one spot. When I climbed up to investigate, I found the dead premie. I did my own PM, and the cause was pretty conclusive. There was a 2 cm hole in the right side of the abdominal cavity with intestines poking out. Poor wee girl probably died in the womb a few weeks earlier, then the mum finally aborted. Nothing could be done, congenital defect.

Today Victoria had her cria at 326 days- a little grey boy. But it was immediately apparent there was something seriously wrong. At first glance it looked like a serious hernia out his umbilicus, with what looked like a little sack full of guts. He was otherwise good sized and quite vigorous. I rushed him to Julia (the vet). There we determined he had large and small intestine, plus a pancreas, which had all developed externally. There were adhesions, and signs that there were probably serious mis-connections internally. Congenital defect, nothing that could be done (barring radical surgery).

He was euthanized, and died almost exactly an hour after he had been born. Poor wee bub. At least he did not suffer.

Hopefully we have now front-end-loaded all our bad luck before the birthing season really commences. And I really hope from here on out everyone keeps there insides and outsides in the right places. (And if anyone is morbidly curious, I do have photos of both cases.)

So, a standard Thursday morning.

Get up. Eat breakfast. Read email. Surf inter-tubes a bit. Put on gum-boots and get to work.

Except there was a stick or stone in my gum boot. Pulled my foot out, checked my sock. No twig. A little shake produced nothing. Walked out into the side yard, and there was definietly something jabbing my toe in there. Take of boot and shake… a piece of hay drops out. Shake harder… and a startled forrest Weta drops out!

So, it was either a spiny leg or his little mandibles that were poking my toes. Thankfully the weta was unharmed, and was released back into the wild.

A rather startling start to the day for the both of us, I figure. His “safe little cave” turned out to have a giant sock-wearing monster living in it.

Lo these many years ago, back in Boston, I took a night-school class at the Billerica tech High School where I learned how to weld. I thought it might be useful some day. Finally that day arrived!

I borrowed a MIG welder from Martin, and back in August I built a trasport cage for our new trailer. Now we can take our camelids places again! (purhasing a spcieally-built high-sided cage with a roof that would be suitable for camelids would have been stupidly expensive)
The quality of my welding was not too good at start, 8+ years without practice will do that, but that last panel or two look pretty good. I know it is strong enough, even if it is not pretty, as each piece had to be able to support my body weight before it “passed QC”.

Now the challenge is getting it all cleaned-up and pretty-looking. The 75mm reinforcing mesh I used came pre-rust coated, so it all needs to be polished clean with a rotary wire brush before I can apply the rust-protective primer. Lots and lots of nooks and crannies to clean! It is going to take a lot of work, but based on the bits I have done so far, it should look pretty darn nice when it is done!