We’re ready for Christmas at Windrush Alpacas… are you?

 

We’ve decked the walls and torqued up the fireplace at our Farm Store so that you can have a relaxing, cozy and enjoyable shopping experience during our next Open Farm Day Event! Why go to the crowded and impersonal malls when you can get something unique for everyone on your shopping list right here at the Windrush Alpaca Farm Store!

• Cushy Socks – like walking on clouds!
• Luxurious Scarves – you’ll want to wear them all the time!
• Cozy Gloves – to keep your fingers toasty warm!
• Comfy Hats – if your head is covered, your whole body stays comfortable!
• Plush Rugs – to accent your favorite room!
• Adorable Toys – for the young and old alike!
• Chic Bags – will be noticed wherever you go!
• And so much more!

Come out to Windrush Alpacas on Saturday, December 3rd between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. for our monthly Open Farm Day Event and Farm Store Shopping Experience.  Tell your friends, bring your family, and enjoy shopping for a change! Spend time on our farm meeting our alpaca herd through guided pasture tours and demonstrations, then sip on some special complimentary Alpaca Bean Coffee. Start — or finish — your shopping right here and enjoy the rest of your holidays!

 

We always offer free admission, free parking and free refreshments.

Call us at 575-683-5177 or visit our website at http://www.windrushalpacas.com for more information. Also, you can Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/WindrushAlpacas and shop online at http://www.windrushalpacas.net/store/.

We’re back on track for 2011!

If you’ve missed my posts, you’ll be happy to know that we’re back on track for more blogs in 2011! Stay tuned… and tell your friends! Life on an alpaca ranch is like no other.

Concern for Queen

Late term pregnancy dams are always on my watch list, I want to keep close tabs on them to make sure that they are acting normally and not showing any changes in behavior that might indicate there is a problem with the pregnancy or the health of the dam.  I also like to watch for movement of the cria, which reassures me that the little one is alive (and usually kicking).

Our alpaca Queen is nine years old and an experienced dam.  She has not had any problems with her previous crias and is one of those great female alpacas who breeds one time, knows she is pregnant and makes it clear to you that she doesn’t need the services of a male again until after her cria is born.  With Queen once she is bred you will not even get her anywhere close to a male, as soon as she sees him she plants her feet in the ground and refuses to move closer to him. 

Queen is a short bodied alpaca and so her pregnancies show very easily.  Currently she has a huge bump and an active cria inside her.  I remember last year when she was expecting Velvet she was also huge and a few days before giving birth amazed me by jumping over one of the trough feeders.

At the weekend I noticed that Queen was sitting around a lot, sometimes with the herd and sometimes on her own.  Of course heavily pregnant dams do tend to sit around more than those that are not pregnant, but there was something about Queen’s behavior that caught my attention.

During our Open Farm Day I had to break away from our visitors when I noticed Queen stand up and hold her tail in an odd position.  I checked to make sure that she didn’t have a cria making it’s appearance under her tail but all looked good.

I call Queen’s tail the semaphore tail as toward the end of her pregnancy she carries it in some very strange positions.  I am sure there must be a meaning to each tail position but have not figured it out yet, and Queen does look quite odd at times with her tail in such positions.  Apparently the semaphore tail is a hereditary trait as Queen’s daughter TeQueely, who is expecting her first cria, has started the same sort of behavior with her tail.  Now there are two of them to drive me crazy with their odd tail positions!

While Queen seemed to be okay after Open Farm Day we have kept a close eye on her.  Her due date is not until May 19^th so she still has a little way to go before her cria is due. 

On Monday Queen did not come in for her evening “extras”.  She usually gets a few extra pellets in the evening due to her age and her stage of pregnancy.  Queen did come over to the pens but did not go in to eat her pellets, which for her is unusual.  Later that evening Ric noticed Queen sitting on her own, we went out and checked her and she seemed okay and by the next morning she was back to eating as normal.

Yesterday Queen again gave us cause for concern.  She was sitting a lot and just looked a little uncomfortable.  I watched her from the house and noticed that she went over to the poop pile but did not pass any poop.  This concerned me and so I went out to check on Queen and discovered that she was grunting every time she took a breath.  She was cushed by the time I got to her and was obviously a little uncomfortable.  It was time for us to take some action.

We enticed Queen into a pen with some hay (not an easy job as she is one shrewd alpaca and knows when we are trying to catch her.)  Once in the pen I took Queen’s temperature, which thankfully was normal.  I tried to listen to her lungs with my stethoscope but the wind was back to blowing hard making it difficult to hear anything.  I did a digital exam of Queen and discovered beans in her rectal tract not far from the rectal opening so all seemed well there, but as a precaution we gave Queen some MSE drench (a great probiotic drench with added enzymes).  To ease Queen’s discomfort I gave her 1.5 cc of banamine, pain management is important in alpacas and the banamine would help Queen relax, it would also help stop any contractions that might have started.  I also treated Queen with my photonic red light on both her standard points and those that affect the lungs and respiration (photonic red light treatment is based on acupressure points).

Apart from her slight discomfort and grunting Queen looked good.  Her eyes were bright and alert and she was certainly ready to get away from us.  As I examined Queen I could feel her cria moving, just from feeling the crias legs under my hand it felt big and that may be why Queen was so uncomfortable.

We kept a close eye on Queen for the rest of the day.  Her grunting stopped after about an hour, by the evening feeding time she was in her pen waiting for food and then had a good feed on the hay too.

Fingers crossed what we saw with Queen yesterday was just a case of late pregnancy discomfort.  When Queen cushes it looks as if her cria is about to pop out at any minute so I am sure a cria that big could be pushing on Queen’s organs and making it’s presence felt.

We will be keeping an even closer eye on Queen for the next few days and if she shows other signs of discomfort I think a visit from the vet will be in order.  As the old adage goes it’s better to be safe than sorry and I would rather have the vet out to tell me all is well than wait and have a major problem in a few days time.

Rosemary

Watching and Waiting For Willow

Willow our escapologist alpaca is looking most definitely pregnant, Ric described her the other day as a little butterball as she almost looks as wide as she is long!  Willow is not a very big alpaca; she takes after her dam Clarissa who is on the small side.  Being small and having a short body does mean that for both Clarissa and Willow their pregnancies show earlier than some of the longer bodied alpacas.

As I have watched Willow’s “bump” grow, I have started to wonder if she is expecting a large cria and if so if she is going to be able to deliver without any problems.  She is maiden and so has not delivered a cria before so I hope that the delivery of her cria will be routine without any problems.  But something has been nagging me about her looking so big, we have other females due before her and even allowing for their body style they still do not look as advanced in their pregnancy as Willow does – and then it struck me, maybe I anticipating the wrong due date.

This really came to mind when I was pulling up Willow’s records the other day.  I had previously run a due date calendar from my Herdlogic software where we keep all the alpaca records and it showed Willow due in June 2008.  While I was looking up some show record information on Willow I checked her breeding records too and those records refreshed my memory as to what happened with Willow during last year’s breeding season.

Willow actually bred three times, the first breeding was one of the earliest ones we did for our herd and was to our Junior Herdsire Trevasura’s Altiplano Treasure.  Willow had cushed readily when introduced to Treasure and the breeding seemed to go well, but during one of the following behavior tests several weeks later she cushed again.  We bred Willow at that time to our herdsire Tobiano and again all seemed to be going well until during one behavior test she cushed again.  We rebred Willow to Tobiano and this time each subsequent behavior test resulted in Willow rejecting the male.  Based on those observations we based Willow’s due date on that last breeding.  Now though I am beginning to wonder.

Simply put, during a pregnancy it is the hormones in the female alpacas system that make her unreceptive to the male alpaca.   What happens though if those hormones are not produced to the necessary levels to instigate that behavior, or if perhaps the female alpacas brain does not recognize those hormones as it should.  Well then you could get a maiden female alpaca that would breed again despite being pregnant.

At this stage it is hard to tell if that is the case with Willow or if she is just carrying a large “bump” during her pregnancy.  We have heard of other alpaca breeders who have had maiden females who breed after being pregnant and then get a cria too early for the latter breeding date.  Once the cria is born the breeders realize that the cria is a result of the first breeding. 

For now all I know is that Willow is definitely pregnant, when she has her cria will perhaps give me a better idea of when she conceived the pregnancy.  Having used two different sires on Willow will also help us determine when the cria was conceived as when we submit the crias blood sample to the Alpaca Registry, Inc. for DNA testing they will let us know which is the correct sire.

I will keep a close eye on Willow in the coming weeks, if the first breeding date was the successful one she could have her cria as early as April, so we need to be prepared in case that is when the cria is born.  All we can do in the meantime is watch and wait, in time nature (and Willow) will give us the answer.

Rosemary  

Persistence Pays Off

Sometimes in the world of alpacas we find ourselves with situations that we are unable to explain.  There is so much we still have to discover about these beautiful creatures and until that time we sometimes have to resort to trial and error to figure things out.

Take for instance the female alpaca that has been with us for breeding since September.  This particular alpaca unfortunately lost her cria last summer at about the seventh month of pregnancy.  She carries a lot of fleece and despite her having been shorn in the spring it appears that the heat of summer caused her to abort her cria.  The seventh month of pregnancy is when the cria really starts to put a demand on the dam, and this combined with other factors can sometimes cause the dam to abort.

So the alpaca was sent back to us for rebreeding.  We noticed upon her arrival that she was considerably heavier than when she was here for her previous visit.   Overweight alpacas sometimes encounter problems getting pregnant so we were not surprised when this girl did not conceive at the first attempt of breeding.  We rationed her feed and fed her in a pen where she could not steal feed from others, but still her weight held.

After three attempts at breeding we became concerned that something was not right and was preventing her from getting pregnant.  We consulted with her owner and decided to do a uterine culture to make sure that this girl did not have a uterine infection.  The results of the culture came back showing no presence of uterine infection.

We tried to breed this girl again and still she did not get pregnant.  We spoke to our vet about the situation, he suggested monitoring her progesterone levels but her owner decided he did not want to do that.  After some discussion her owner asked if it was possible for us to use a different male, which is what we did.  Low and behold we bred the alpaca to a different male one time and yesterday we were able to confirm the pregnancy by means of a progesterone test.

So what went on with this girl?  We really do not have an explanation.  The male we used for the first attempts at breeding is an experienced male and other females we bred to him at the same time all became pregnant, so we cannot think that there was any problem with the male.  If the problem was with the female you would think that it would not matter which male we bred her too as that problem would still prevent her from getting pregnant.  All we can say for sure is that changing to a different male ended up in the result that we had been trying to acheive for many weeks.

We have heard of this happening to other breeders but this is the first time it had happened to us.  We have also heard camelid reproductive specialists talk about using a different male if you have a female who is proving difficult to breed but even they cannot give an explanation as to why switching to a different male sometimes works.

At the end of the day our willingness to try something else and our persistence paid off and we were able to notify the alpacas owners that their alpaca is pregnant.  We may never fully discover why using a different male worked, but hopefully one day someone will conduct some research that will lead to an explanation of what is going on in this situation.

Fingers crossed that this time the alpaca will hold her pregnancy to term, and that next Spring her owners will be celebrating the arrival of their new cria.

Rosemary

To Shear Or Not To Shear – That Is The Question!

It’s that time of the year when an alpaca owner’s thoughts turn to shearing.  Alpacas require shearing once a year and we usually like to shear in the spring after the risk of freezing temperatures has passed.

When we first started with alpacas we used to take them all to another breeders farm where a shearer had been contracted to work for the day.  This was fine except for the fact that it was a three hour drive one way, and as our herd grew it was not really practical to load them all up and drive them to the shearing.

So we progressed to having the shearer come to our farm to shear.  We would let other alpaca and llama owners know that we had a shearer coming and we typically ended up shearing 50-60 alpacas in a day.

Unfortunately this year the shearer decided it was not “economically viable” to come to our place to shear.  He had mentioned last year that the driving distance between farms in the Southwest cost him time out of his shearing schedule, so it was not a complete surprise when he told us that he would not be coming.

Fortunately Ric had attended a shearing clinic last year and had managed to get a little practice during the year.  Bob Dart from Llano Soleado Alpacas had also attended the shearing clinic and so we planned that we would start shearing our herds from April onwards and shear a few alpacas each weekend.  The shearing project was going to be a protracted one this year but at least we would get it done.  Or so we thought – because what we hadn’t counted on was the weird weather we have been experiencing this year.

We had planned on shearing a few alpacas last Saturday – it snowed.  Okay we thought, we will just plan on shearing some today (Good Friday) and Saturday.  Surely with us all working together for two days we could get several alpacas shorn.  Well guess what the forecast is for Friday through Sunday – rain, snow and freezing temperatures.  The forecast mentions 1 – 2 inches of snow accumulation and Saturday’s daytime high is only supposed to be 38!

As much as we want to get started on shearing, we have to consider how they alpacas will feel if they go from being full fleeced to shorn and then have to be outside in below freezing temperatures.  Not good I am sure.  There is also a fair bit of rain forecast until Thursday and really it is best to avoid shearing wet fleeces if at all possible.

So I suspect we will not be shearing this weekend, I just wouldn’t feel right at having a herd of “naked” alpacas sitting out in the snow and cold.

Hopefully we will be able to get started soon,  fortunately I did manage to find a professional shearer who is able to come in mid May and shear whatever we have not managed to shear ourselves.  Surely by then the snow will be gone – but the way this year is going who knows!

 Rosemary

PS And a special Happy Birthday to Regina Dart of Llano Soleado Alpacas, who claims it always snows on her birthday! I guess she didn’t really want to shear alpacas on her birthday anyway – and who can blame her!