Our Peruvian Dark Thunder

Today, day 354, Sancha gave birth to our first cria from our male, SA Peruvian Greyt Exxpectations. We were very eager to see how Greyt's cria would turn out. We are very excited to say this cria is a mini of Greyt! It's hard to tell fiber characteristics on a newborn, but we can already see a lot of grey peeking through his dark brown fiber. He seems dense (it is hard to part his fiber to see his skin), with tons of curly cue fiber.

Birth stats:
Male
18.8 pounds
Dark Rose grey!

This is actually the smallest cria we've had from Sancha, the other 3 she has had on our farm have been 20+ pounds. But birth weight really doesn't indicate full grown weight. And actually I like the smaller size adults anyway (which was one of the reasons we bred Sancha to Greyt, he's the smaller size I like).

It's a boy :) And he appears to be a dark rose grey. At first J was saying he was brown, but I could see the grey all over his legs and as his fiber is starting to dry, we can see grey on his back and neck, just like his sire. I can't get over how much he looks like his sire, SA Peruvian Greyt Exxpectations. One look at this boy and we knew we are going to repeat this breeding!

For Sancha's offspring we have used the theme of nature. We joked early on that if she had a dark boy we should name him Dark Thunder, since another boy we had from Sancha we named White Lightning. When this dark boy was born, we knew Dark Thunder fit, so we named him: Our Peruvian Dark Thunder.

Isn't he cute?!





Every time we have a birth on our farm, I marvel at how nature works. Sancha is an experienced mom, but still, it's so impressive how she knows what to do. She didn't read any books (though maybe the alpaca moms hold mom meetings in the barn and talk about parenting methods, but I sort of doubt it). After we weighed the little guy, Sancha walked him over into the shade, clucked at him and nuzzled him with her nose so that he would go to nurse. After she nursed him, she walked him over to the poop pile. There she pooped and he peed:



I'm so impressed, only a few hours old and already potty trained!

Mom shows lots of affection towards him:



Here he is next to Cheyenne (we just weighed Cheyenne today and she is 24 pounds, growing very well).
In this picture (from left to right) is Tehya, Cheyenne, Thunder and Sancha: