New girl, Verity with Alice behind.
I am a little confused down here in Patouland and it is the girls who are confusing me.
To bring you up to speed we have had 4 females in a row and the tally now stands at 5 boys and 6 girls.
A week ago we had the unexpected arrival of Verity who had only been cooking for 323 days. Alice is quite a stressy girl and she gave birth three days after shearing. No doubt in my mind that the shearing brought her on. Verity was a good weight at just over 8kg but was flat and lifeless. Four days of intensive care and we managed to get her strong enough to feed from Alice. They have now rejoined the herd and all appears well. Verity is not confusing me, I know who she is.
Una isn't confusing me either. She is a bundle of energy as can been seen below. She is also a sneaky little thing. She is our bottle baby, her mother has very poor quality milk and Una has been taking a litre or so of goats milk each day. Recently however she has been refusing her bottle and has been seen with milky chops. After hours of observations we have seen her sneakily feeding from four different mothers! She seems to watch and wait and when a cria goes under she whips round to the other side and wham bam thank you mam!
Una, racing off as a cria starts to feed on the other side of the field!
It is now that the girls get confusing. Two days after Verity was born, we came home from a lunch out to find that Minstrel had popped out a lovely little black girl who we have named Violet. She is, as you can see, beautiful. I think that is her.
This is when it all starts to get confusing you see. Here is Ulani, daughter of Bobby, I think.
Then we have Willow, with Umbria and someone else in the background. Do you see my problem? They all look the bloody same. I mean they all have the same father (Qjori) but really!
These two girls for instance, anyones guess. Willow and Umbria I think but I may be wrong.
You see out of the 6 female cria, four of them are black. Which we all know is the new brown!
Here's three of them, but I can't tell you who is missing! All I can say is that they are all beautiful!
People who know us and read this tripe will know that we will fight and fight to keep our alpacas alive but this time we just weren't here. I know we can't watch them all the time but I can't shake off the feeling that I have let Spirit down. I will hurt for some time over this one, I'm welling up again now, she deserved more, we should have been here.
8 comments:
I feel for you Mark and know what you mean - but it is just impossible to be there every minute.
Lovely bunch of Qjoris
So sorry to read about Spirit. Big hug sent!
I suppose...with all those little girls looking the same...must be just how the breeders of whites must be each year as I can never see much difference between white/fawn crias! maybe you could paint their toenails different colour...that would help cheer you up as well!
You just can't be there all the time Mark, really bad luck, don't blame yourself.
On the confusion front - we use collars with tags on until we get to know our 'confusing' crias .. really helpful, especially when there're all in a pen together and you're medicating them for something, so much better than ear tags.
Just rotten luck Mark the outcome would have been the same had you been there no doubt.
A ready made progeny class there I think!
sorry to hear that Mark, small comfort, but perhaps nature was able to deal with it and save you the anguish of trying to save a life that couldn't be sustained.
So sorry.
The babies are all beautiful, but I especially like the dark girls.
Hindsight is a marvellous thing !! You can only do your best, and even if you are there ... sometimes it isn't enough. Those babies are beautiful ..peas in a pod,no wonder you can't tell ..who's who ! Try not to ponder on the regrets...and just enjoy the moment...we can't change the past, but we can enjoy the present !! ... Jayne
Have you git a secret Alpaca cloning progrramme going on there ?
Post a Comment