How very very exciting!

I'm excited, very excited, in fact I can hardly sit still and I haven't even had any coffee yet! I have one next to me now so I could very much expire with exhaustion prior to lunch but for now I am able to type without whooping too much. So why am I excited (it doesn't take much these days) I am excited about teenie tiny things. No we haven't had another cria, which would have been a good guess as that does get me very excited. No, I am excited about our latest cria, little Truffle.

Sue and I have just been out to do Truffle's daily weight check, which first involved catching her. This is getting harder each day as she can now seemingly disappear from one spot and appear in another like some sort of super hero. However with a two pronged cornering manoeuvre she was snaffled and we could get on with the business in hand. She now weighs 9.16kg, a fantabulous gain of 860g in less than 3 days so in that respect we are very happy.
This was the first time, due to working opposite shifts, that we have had the opportunity to have a really good look at her fleece together.

Coat off I gave her another jab of Amoxypen (a precautionary measure advised by the vet) and then we had  a good look at Truffle's fleece.

I have to say that I have never seen a cria fleece like it. Never. Bearing in mind she had been wearing a coat since birth which is constantly moving against the fleece it shouldn't look at it's best but crikey it is beautiful!

Neither of us have ever seen such tiny crimp. Tiny little crimp everywhere. Up her neck, down her legs, down into the belly, just everywhere. We have 33 registered Patou cria prior to Truffle and some of them have gone on to do really well in the shows around the country but none of them have had this sort of crimp in their fleeces at this stage, not one of them. Maybe breeders of the lighter coloured alpacas see this all the time, maybe breeders of the darker colours too, I am just saying that we have never seen it before. And that has made me very excited.

So where has it come from? Well Truffle's mother Dee (Indira of Cambridge) is our mystery girl. A Chilean import with no pedigree Dee is now 14 years old. Dee is also the mother to our top brown female, Reeya (a Jack of Spades daughter). So Dee is a quality cria producer.

Truffle's father is a bit better known in that he has a superb Australian pedigree, but as yet he is unproven as a herdsire. He is of course my boy, my big brown boy, The big Q, Van Diemen Qjori of Patou. Now we know he is a quality alpaca I mean just look at him! But seriously his fleece blew us away when we first saw him in Tasmania. That's why he's here now.

I am not so naive that I don't know that fleeces change, sometimes dramatically, as an alpaca grows but by crikey this is a good start! Reeya is also pregnant to Qjori.

The grand plan for world domination is taking shape!