playing catch-up

Alpaca Festival of Oregon video

1. above is the video Eduard Schwan put together for the AFO. Awesome. (I thought I looked pregnant then. You should see me now!)
2. Consuella had a little boy, also found in the field, dry and bouncing, on July 16th (I think). We're calling him "Krusty the Klown," and Lisa's baby "Mona Simpson" (Homer's mom).
   
3. Sophie had surgery on her jaw for the infected tooth (lumpy jaw) that had plagued her since January. The surgery was a success and she no longer needs daily antibiotics! However, we discovered some sort of skin problem on a back foot that has been difficult to treat.
   
4. We've bred four girls for 2011 babies. We haven't bred the maidens because the economy is soft and we are at alpaca capacity on our farm.
5. My (human) baby is due any time now, which explains both the lag in posting on this blog and the future posting on this blog. I hope around the first of the year to get back on a regular posting schedule.

That's it from here!
m

Awesome video about us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hihYRo634wc

Here is a link to a video made by a great guy named Eduard Schwan: http://www.schwansongs.com/SchwanSongs/Home.html. He literally walked up to me during the show with a camera and after chatting, we did a couple interviews. This one is me talking up ETF and Paca Talk. Later, I'll post a video about the AFO itself.

You will note how pregnant I am. I knew I was getting big because I keep running into things, but MAN. And that was three weeks ago.

In other news, Lisa had her baby on July 11. It's a little white girl out of Danny, from Sylvan Skies. We found her dry in the field at 4 PM. Everything looks great! She's adorable, and I'll post pictures once my computer starts behaving properly.

Enjoy the video!

m

New(ish) Cria!

Meet Malibu Stacy!


Born 3/24/10

Wt: 17 lbs.

Color: Medium/dark fawn

Dam: Cabernet

Sire: Comet of Sylvan Skies





Her future handler here is our daughter, nicknamed the "Agent of Entropy." In these pictures, Stacy is about three hours old.

Enjoy the cuteness!

m

Surprise! Cria a week early!

Sophie had her baby a week early! He's a surprise, not only because he's a hair early, but also because he's a darling little brown boy: his mama's black and his daddy's grey. It really is like Christmas with alpaca colors. 

Name suggestions so far include: Stampy, Moe, and Troy McClure (you may remember him from such movies as "cry hard!").

Do you have a suggestion for a name for this little guy? Drop me a comment or send me an email if you do!

m

Welcome Canyonera!

Dawn's cria was born on July 15, 2009. She appeared in the pasture about 12:30 in the afternoon, a nice surprise.

She's a little one: born at about 12 pounds. She's quite a personality, however. She's what you would call "vigorous."

Let me explain the grandiose name. Her daddy is Escalade, which is the name of a very large SUV. There was an episode of the Simpsons that was about another very large SUV: the Canyonero.
This little one is a girl, so we just feminized it to Canyonera.

Here is a group shot of Canyonera (a few days), Margie (22 days)and Apu (almost 4 months).

Margie is now over 18 pounds, which isn't bad. The vet looked at her when he came to give Canyonera the once-over and decided to try a couple things: creep feeding, more vitiamin B and one more round of antibiotics because he heard a tiny rumble in her lungs.

I'll post more about the creep feeder I built in a later post. For now, just enjoy the baby cuteness.

m

Margie gaining weight!

Li'l Margie has put on 11 ounces since the vet visit. She's FINALLY over her birth weight of 14# 13oz. She's 13 days old now. A normal cria would have put on 5-6 lbs. by now.

Here's a chart of her weight in ounces (240 ounces is 15 pounds). "a" is am and "p" is pm weights:Click on the chart to get a bigger view of it.

You can see that we really had some trouble there. The biggest dip happened the day we saw Margie nursing and turned her and her mom out with the herd, like we have with every other baby we've had. That was a mistake that took a week to recover from.

I'm going to err on the side of caution and keep them confined to the barn for at least another day, then perhaps we'll let them out into the 50-foot run for a day and see if she keeps gaining weight.

She's going to make it. I wonder how long it will take for her to "catch up," though.

In other news, Dawn is now approaching the 360-days pregnant mark. She was bred on 7/14/08. Her baby is doing jumping jacks inside her and she looks alternately profoundly uncomfortable and in zen-like peace. Please, Lord of Alpaca Births, let this one be a girl.

m

Little Margie update

Lisa's cria is healthy, but not gaining weight.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (@marenster) have been getting periodic updates on Lisa's cria, whom we have named Marge Simpson (Little Margie until she outgrows it). To those of you who rely on my blog entries for updates, I apologize for the lag in information.

The good news is that Margie is a bright, happy, vigorous little girl. The bad news is that she is 10 days old, and is not gaining weight. She even weighs 4 ounces less than she did when she was born!

As a reminder, Lisa is a first-time mom, and it took her and Margie about two days to figure out the whole nursing thing. We bottle-fed Margie for several days while they figured this out. We have been trying to bottle feed her for the past few days, but she has been refusing it. Yet, she hardly gained any weight at all.

We finally had the vet out today. He has declared that Margie is healthy, but isn't eating enough. This would sound dumb, but my own little human child had trouble eating enough when she was a week old, so there. The vet gave Margie a shot of B-vitamins to stimulate her appetite and some antibiotics just to be safe.

So, we're not going to harass her with a bottle anymore, and she and mom are confined to the barn until Margie gains some weight steadily. She is a cute little fighter, and I think she'll be fine, but man, she's absorbed a huge amount of time.

It's worth it.

m

Bottle-feeding update

We won't have to bottle-feed Lisa's cria until she's weaned! Hooray!

We may, however, need to supplement her with a bottle during the day.

The little girl began nursing on her own on Sunday night. Light bulbs were flashing that whole day, but that evening was the first time we saw Lisa stand still as the baby connected with the teat. We heard satisfying slurping sounds, and afterward, the baby refused the bottle.

We watched her nurse again on Monday morning, she refused the bottle, and she maintained her weight overnight, so we let them out into the beautiful June sunshine. Lisa hadn't quite figured out how to defend her baby from the larger cria, and sometimes wandered off to graze, leaving the little one alone, but she is a teen-aged mother. She is much better about this today (Tuesday).

The long day outside must have been quite exhausting for the little baby, though, because we discovered when we weighed her that night that she had lost 1/2 pound since breakfast! Oops. Tuesday morning, she had maintained her weight overnight, and had a marathon nursing breakfast, and refused the bottle again. We let them back out into the fields with the herd with a little trepidation.

If she loses weight again today, I will give her a bottle (if she'll take it), and call the vet in the morning for advice. She is very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and bouncy, just as a cria should be, so I am not too concerned.

Here are some things we tried to get Lisa to let the baby nurse:

• Kept an older dam in the stall with them
• Moved a nursing dam into the stall next to them
  
• Milked the dam to stimulate Oxytocin and so we could include mother's milk in the bottle feedings.
  
• Held the dam while letting the cria walk beneath her (some new dams are afraid of things under them or near their backends)
• Held the dam while directing the cria towards the udder/nipples.
  
• Expressed some of the milk from the nipples and rubbed it on the baby's nose/let her lick it off our fingers.
  
• Bottle-fed only after we tried the above.
  

Some things that were suggested to us, but that we couldn't or didn't try:

• put the placenta back into the stall (it was already in the freezer at this point)
• put the dam of the new mama in the stall with them (Grandma was on another farm being bred)

This whole experience will be part of a future Paca Talk episode, to be sure. We have learned a lot since Friday night!

m

Lisa's Cria update

Lisa's Cria, June 27, 2009

The vet says everything is great, except mom is being a dummy about nursing. He showed us a couple techniques to try to get the light bulb to turn on, but until then, we're doing hourly feedings. Our goal is to get the baby girl strong enough that she can follow her mother around and finally nurse on her own.

The timing couldn't be better for this. I shudder to think what would have happened if the baby had been born while I was teaching, for example.

Well, anyway, I'm going to supervise my human baby. Maybe I'll go to bed when she does and make DH do the night feedings? THAT will be popular. :)

m

Worth the Wait

Lisa has finally had her baby! Hooray!

06/26/09
9:55 PM
Female
White,
14 lbs., 13 oz.
Vigorous.

I checked on Lisa and Dawn just before we went out to dinner in the late afternoon yesterday. I noticed that Lisa finally had a milk bag and her vulva was longer than usual, and jiggly. But she didn't seem to be in any discomfort, just grazing away.

When we put the animals away last night (the girls and babies sleep in the barn), Lisa looked...off to me. I decided to come back and check on her in an hour, and I'm so glad I did. When I got back out there at a quarter to ten, Lisa's baby was already head and feet out! The birth was uneventful except for the time. (Nearly all alpaca births happen during daylight hours. New moms don't always read that memo).

There is a caveat, of course. Lisa is a new mom, and she is a bit clueless. She won't stand still so that the baby can nurse. I was out in the barn with them until 11:30 last night, and then went out at 2:30 a.m. to see if the baby had nursed. The cria was moving around very well, but so was Lisa.

At 6:30 a.m. it was still apparent that the baby hadn't nursed. She was going to the corners of the barn and licking the walls. Cria seem to try to nurse off of the darkest place they can find. In a field during the day, this would be under momma. In a barn, there are lots of dark places.

We made up some colostrum mix, and I've been feeding it to the baby, though I haven't been able to get much down her. The vet is coming late this afternoon to help us out. This is a strong baby, so I'm not too worried, but I wish Consuella, Lisa's mom, were here to give her some guidance.

Pictures soon.
m

Meet Apu!

Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is the newest member of the Evergreen Terrace family. So it took us two weeks to settle on a name. We're lame and we know it.

m