Matriarch

There is a hierarchy within the herd, a matriarch. Our herd leader is Victoria:





If she squeals, she gets whatever she wants. For example at grain time, if she squeals, another alpaca will leave their bowl of grain and let her have it. Victoria also has a tendency to put on weight, so we feed her separate with the other heavier girls. We figure if Victoria gets all their grain, no harm done. The skinner girls would have no chance if fed by her. Victoria does this with hay too, she'll squeal and others will back away from the bucket. Not that being the leader is easy. Every so often another girl will challenge her and a spit fight or even a neck wrestle will ensue. The ones most likely to challenge her are Miss Kitty and Snickers. So far Victoria has maintained her leadership of the herd. We laugh when a new girl comes and thinks she can take Victoria on. Victoria is a smaller alpaca (closer to 130 pounds, when average is about 160), but she's tough.

I love Victoria's wonderful reddish brown color. Her fiber has an incredible silky feel to it too. I love how woolly her face is (a trait she has passed onto her offspring). Often cria have that woolly look, but there aren't too many older girls who still have it. Victoria does.

Oak Haven Alpacas, LLC, on ETSY

I updated our farm sales page on ETSY.

I added some of Shelby's fiber for sale. I found this cute picture of her (I haven't seen her in over a year, I guess I'm feeling nostalgic).



I updated some of the postings on ETSY, though I know there are more blankets I don't have posted there. Another time I'll work on getting more up there. I also would like to attend more fiber festivals. I have done so in the past and I know it's so much fun. I just wish I had more yarn, rovings and finished products so that I could put together a full set up.

But I think the real fun is coming to the farm and digging through my fiber room in person, to see and feel and know what you are getting ~ anyone is welcome! Just tell me when it would work for you.

More organized than I thought

Sometimes I surprise myself and do neat things that I forget about. I knew at one point I had weighed out and put together zip lock bags of alpaca fiber. I remember doing this, but some where along the way I forgot about it. I think I assumed all of these had been sold.

While organizing my fiber room the other day, I came across several boxes filled with neat and organized 4 ounce bags of alpaca fiber:





They are weighed out with 4 ounces of fiber in each bag. The bags are labled with the alpaca's name, year of shearing, and price. So organized!



I was most excited to find several bags of Shelby's fiber. Shelby is an incredible girl who was born on our farm in 2008. She was our favorite by far (a breeding between our favorite dam Victoria bred to the famous Goldsmith). Shelby was sold at action in the spring of 2010, so we only ever had one shearing off of her in 2009. I know I spun up some of her fiber, and I also knew I had sold some bags at fiber festivals. I thought it was all gone. This past weekend I found six more bags of her fiber! That's 1.5 pounds of Shelby's fiber! I was so excited to get my hands on it. While I put some for sale on our farm's ETSY page, I am also keeping some for myself. Shelby is so soft and bright and smooth, a dream to spin.

My Fiber Room

For those who have visited our farm and braved the tour into my fiber room, you won't believe this:



My fiber room had gotten out of control. It started sometime last winter, then we had shearing this spring and it got even worse. You couldn't even see the floor it was such a disaster, and I couldn't find what I needed when I needed it.

On Saturday I was down in the fiber room looking for a specific bag of fiber and decied it was as good a time as any to organize things.

I am a bit limited in what I can do down there because our basement is under construction. So, the door and the door frame aren't something I can do anything with right now. But there was so much I could move and pick up, I had let our construction be my excuse.

The dryer that is in there is not being used as a dryer, it is my fiber tumbler. It is not hooked up to heat, and inside there are nails set up to pull apart the fiber which helps get out dirt and debris. I tumble the fiber in there before I flick it to spin it into yarn. And there is a sewing machine in my fiber room. It belongs to my grandmother, a true family heirloom. I put one of my grandmother's blankets over the sewing machine to keep the dust and fiber away.

I didn't have too many options of where to put the bags of fiber, so I lined them up along the farthest wall. I did organize the bags by type of fiber.



On the far left side are the blankets off our older alpacas and all our seconds (seconds would be something like neck fiber). I want to do something with these but haven't decided what yet. I've heard having them made into rugs or socks is a good way to use up this type of fiber.

On top of the chair frames are the bags of fiber that I want to spin. These are the unique blankets, the prime blankets, my favorites!! Animals like Teyha with her beautiful fading fawn colors, or Challenger with his variated grey colors ~ so beautiful! Pretty much all of our grey animals fit this category - Greyt, Tucker, Challenger, Twilight and Rose. Spinning these myself serves two purposes. First, I love them and dream of spinning them. The unique colors and fun patterns are what make me want to spin them (I get bored spinning solid colors). The other reason is that it's harder to have a mill spin these unique blankets because it would be a very small batch, and the mill would mix them up so much you wouldn't see the unique and fun colors anymore. Our plan was for me to spin up these more interesting blankets. Now I know right where to find them!

Then on the far right are the blankets that I want to send to the mill to make into yarn. We have quite a few brown alpacas, and could mix them together for some brown yarn. We also have a lot of fawn, which we could do the same with. I also put our white blankets there. We don't have a lot of white (which we have done on purpose), but I still think I want to send it to the mill (you have to pay more per ounce if you don't have as much of it, you can get a bulk rate for the bigger lots of a color). But the truth is that I HATE to spin up white alpaca. I find the really fine really white fleeces to be a pain to spin. Maybe I would be ok with it if I had it in rovings, but from raw, it's a pain to spin. When they are so fine, it's hard not to over spin them (and end up with a tough rope instead of yarn). And white is so boring to me. I much prefer the variated colors of the fading fawns and greys than the boring white (that spins up off white no matter what I do). I know you can dye white, but that's something I decided early on I didn't want to do. Our focus has always been on the variety of natural color alpacas. We aim to have alpacas in all the colors, so I have a variety of colored yarn straight from our alpacas. Maybe I should sell the white fleece to those who do enjoy dying. I know some people are really good at it and create some incredible fun colors.

Now I feel more motivated to get the bags to mill that I can, and to spin up the bags of unique fiber that I set aside for myself.

Carrots

While the main diet for alpacas is hay, we also feed our alpacas grain, and the occasional treat of something like carrots. Our girls especially love carrots. Zack loves to bring out a bag of carrots and have them swarm and follow him around.

Here he is entering the pasture of girls. The large white alpaca is Sancha. Sancha is an older lady who is typically not interested in what we are doing, unless there are carrots involved:



Zack has walked around the corner and all the girls are following him as fast as they can:

Eating

It seems all our alpacas do is eat.

I know in their native land in South American, they spend their days searching for grass to eat. In the morning they walk down the mountains to find grassy areas in the lower lands. In the evening they walk up the mountains so that overnight they are less vulnerable to predators.

In some ways it's sad that we've taken away their daily goal of seeking out grass. I wonder if our alpacas are bored? They seem happy, and love to dive head first into our hay buckets. I often will see some of them happily wandering the back areas of our pasture (I use the term pasture loosely here as we don't actually have grassy pasture land, it's been too big of a challenge to grow good grass in our woods with such pure sandy soil). I think some of our alpacas have more of a drive to wander and find grass. There are ones I almost always find wandering the area. There are others that park themselves by the hay buckets and don't move all day. Some even eat hay out of the bucket while cushed down (I equate that to a human couch potato).

We have several different hay buckets so that everyone has a chance to get hay.



There can be problems when some alpacas hog the bucket and chase others away, and often it's the heavier girls who hog the hay bucket so the skinnier ones get less hay and remain skinny. We make sure there are places they all have access to hay because the skinny ones need the hay the most.

Here is Sancha (the white one) and Maddie (the black one) at one hay station. Maddie is one who will frequently wander our pastures and eat anything green she can find. Maddie has always been more of a loner than typical, I wonder if that wandering searching instinct is more pronounced in her.



At this bucket there is (from left to right) Miss Kitty, Jewel and Latte (they are all a shade of fawn):



There were quite a few at this bucket ~ our hay wagon (Kateri, Victoria, Snickers, Rose, Tehya and Thunder):



I find some of the girls have a favorite bucket that they go to just about everyday. Others wander from bucket to bucket throughout the day constantly searching for the best hay. And some pick a bucket (a different one each time) and settle in for quite a while.

The yearling boys have their own area and do not have to deal with the ornery girls. The boys eating in their hay bucket:

Updated Our Alpaca's Family Trees

There is a link on the left column of this blog to Our Alpaca's Family Trees. I created this awhile back so that I can keep track of each family tree, and so that others of you can see which animals are related and how. I updated this is show this years cria. We had 1 girl we didn't breed due to a later fall birth (Latte), we had 2 girls who absorbed their pregnancies and were then open this spring (Maddie and Snickers), we had a retained CL (Kateri), we had a newborn death (Victoria's little guy), and we had a 2 month old die from a bowel obstruction (Tehya's cria Cheyenne). This leaves us with one healthy cria - Our Peruvian Dark Thunder (from Sancha).

Here is the updated page:

In an effort to organize our farm animals, I put together these family trees, growing from each of our breeding females. I listed the dams in order of when they came to our farm, then their offspring under them. I added their birth year behind their names, and their color (abbreviated - see key at the bottom of the page).

I did consider adding the cria these dams had before they came to our farm, but I haven't done that yet.

Kateri (2004 LB):

+ bred to NWA, LTD Accoyo's Goldsmith (1999 MF) for:
Kateri’s Tehya (2008 LF)

- bred to SHVN The Buccaneer (2006 TB) for:
OHVNA Pocahontas (2009 DRG/ID):

+ bred to Express's Accoyo Adonis (2006 W) for:
OHVNA Chaska (2010 B):

+ Retained CL (2011)


Hana’s Victoria (2004 DB)

- bred to NWA, LTD Accoyo's Goldsmith (1999 MF) for:
Victoria’s Shelby (2008 MB)

+ bred to Peruvian Twister (2004 LF) for:
OHVNA The Cavalier (2009 LF)

+ bred to ARF Our Peruvian Tucker (2006 CLSG) for:
OHVNA The Challenger (2010 CDRG)

+ bred to My Peruvian Georgio (2006 LF) for: Little Guy (2011 DB; born and died July 2011)


GF Raphaella’s Sancha (1998 W):

- bred to RO Centurion Magic (MF) for:
Sommerfield (2007 B)

- bred to Aztec's Peruvian Avatar (2002 W) for:
Sancha’s White Lightning (2008 W)

- bred to 2002 Peruvian Lord Stanley (2002 LB) for:
Snow Lily by Lord Stanley (2009 W)

- bred to Apollo's Griffon (2006 LB) for:
Our Copper Canyon (2010 LB)

+ bred to SA Peruvian Greyt Exxpectations (2007 MMRG) for:
Our Peruvian Dark Thunder (2011 MMRG)


KSF Midnight Masquerade (2007 TB)

+ bred to NL Smokey (2003 MDSG) for:
Smokey’s Twilight (2010 DSG)

+ Open this year (2011)


Persnickety Miss (2002 DF)

+ bred to Snowmass Enlightenment (2004 CMRG) for:
Enlightenment’s Rocky Rose (2010 CMRG)

+ open (2011)


Straightfork Vanilla Latte (2006 LF)

+ bred to Straightfork Peruvian Eclipse (2006 LF) for:
Eclipse’ Ginger Ale (2010 MF)

+ Open 2011


Kateri’s Tehya (2008 LF)

+ bred to Peruvian Navigator (2005 CDRG) for:
OHVNA Cheyenne (2011 CLRG; born May 2011, died July 2011)


+ = offspring is on our farm
- = offspring is on another farm
italic = an animal we own

Color Chart:
W = white
B = beige
LF = light fawn
MF = medium fawn
DF = dark fawn
LB = light brown
MB = medium brown
DB = dark brown
BB = bay black
TB = true black
LSG = light silver grey
MSG = medium silver grey
DSG = dark silver grey
LRG = light rose grey
MRG = medium rose grey
DRG = dark rose grey
C ~ before any grey means classic grey (tuxedo grey)
M ~ before any grey means modern grey (roan grey)
IL = indefinite light
ID = indefinite dark

And then there was 1

We had it confirmed by the vet today that Kateri is not pregnant.

We believe she has what is referred to at as a “Retained Corpus Luteum” (Retained CL). I will attempt to explain this is layman terms. When breeding alpacas, the female is an induced ovulator, meaning she will release an egg when she hears the male orgle (they do not have a regular monthly cycle). Then the male breeds her and the egg meets the sperm, a cria results. Well if the female releases an egg, but the sperm never meets up with her - then what? Most often the egg is reabsorbed by the female's body, and she's bred again another day. Sometimes the female's body takes this unfertilized egg and believes it is pregnant, which is what appears to have happened to Kateri. She is spit testing as pregnant, but in fact is not.

Here is a link I found where someone else explained it:

"False Pregnancies".
Occasionally a female that has ovulated but is not pregnant will have a retained corpus luteum ("CL"), resulting
in a "false pregnancy". The CL has failed to regress, despite the egg not being fertilized. She thinks she is
pregnant and behaves accordingly, but is in fact empty. Such a female may require prostaglandin to facilitate
regression of the CL and she should be receptive again anywhere between 24-72 hours afterwards.

Our vet gave her a shot to assist her in letting go of the retained CL. We should be able to breed her in a few days.

J and I knew this to be so, but we kept holding out hope. It would have been nice to have another cria. We would have liked to have seen a healthy happy cria be born, after this rough summer that we have had.

So this means 1 2011 cria for us - Our Peruvian Thunder. Last year at this time we were preparing for 6 cria, what a shock to only have 1. While it means some changes for our spring show schedule, I'm most sad for Thunder who loved running and pronking with Cheyenne and is now left with the grumpy old ladies.

Walking Stick

Even though I live in the woods and have an alpaca farm, there are still many times nature amazes me.

Last week we saw two walking sticks on the side of our house! I've seen them a couple times before, but it's still amazing to look and watch them. Zack and I noticed how their body looks like a stick, and their legs look like pine needles. Isn't nature cleaver!?

Flies

My son, Zack, has been telling me that he is going to invent a way to rid the world of all flies. He thinks they are annoying, and that the must go. Now, I know they are annoying, but I also believe that in some ways nature is a fragile system and that messing with it like that could have horrible consequences. I reminded Zack that flies help decompose things and that we need flies. He doesn't completely believe that reason, since he thinks there are enough birds to do that job (as much as I try to tell him that while a vulture can help with decomposing an animal, there is more that flies do that vultures can't, he doesn't buy my reasoning). I think it will be some time before Zack devises his plan, and hopefully along the way he'll learn more about our fragile ecosystem.

Flies can be a nuisance on the farm. We deal with them by putting out fly traps. It's amazing how many flies we catch in them!

This is our favorite trap because it seems the catch the most:



Here they are pretty much full (I call these the fly mortuary):



These traps work by having a smelly substance inside that attracts the flies. There is a hole in the bottom of the container that is cone shaped. The flies fly in to get to the smelly substance but can't figure out how to fly out (I'm sure there are some that do get out, but most do not and soon meet their death).

We also spread DE (Diatomaceous Earth) on top of the alpaca's poop piles. I wrote more about DE last year (link to post here). We've had times we used DE and times we didn't (usually because we couldn't find any to buy), and each time we notice a huge difference in the amount of flies. I believe the DE kills off the fly larva, stopping the fly life-cycle. It's a natural product so you don't have to worry about chemical side effects. The biggest thing to me is that it works, we have found nothing else that comes close to working as well.

The bag of DE:



DE spread on the ground:

Spot

Since on my last post I cheated and used an old picture of Spot, here are a couple current ones.

This is how Spot greets me every time I go outside:



It's hard to get a true sense of Spots size in these pictures. He's quite a big dog. If he was a house dog, he'd take up the whole couch (he is not a house dog, he's a working farm dog and spends all his time with the alpacas, he has never been in our house).

Spot is on the other side of the gate, and Quinn our family dog (an American Eskimo) is on front side of the gate:



We have two house dogs, Quinn our American Eskimo (who is so cute but sheds a ton), and Shadow, our miniature schnauzer (who is cute and does not shed much). Spot is friendly towards our house dogs, but we don't typically let them play together other then sniffs and jabs at each other through the fence.

Spots rough spot

When I was outside finishing up some chores, I noticed our farm dog, a Great Pyrenees, Spot, was laying funny. I wondered if he had a belly ache or if he injured his leg. I got distracted with something (either a child yelled for me or the phone rang), so I ran inside to deal with whatever it was, and I sort of forgot about Spot (sorry Spot!!). It was maybe 15 minutes later that J asked me to come outside to help him feed some extra grain to Gabe. While out there I noticed Spot and was reminded about my concern. This time I suggested J go check him out (yes, I know, note I didn't rush over to help Spot, somehow I seem to think illness or injury is something J should attend to. And to be honest, with all the things that have happened on our farm this summer, I couldn't bare to discover another one). J walked over and was concerned that Spot did not jump up to greet him. Then J tried to get Spot to stand up and he wouldn't! That was even more scary. Spot is a very friendly dog who usually walks over to greet us and won't leave our side as long as we are in the pasture. J picked Spot up (this is a 125 pound dog here), and from my angle all I could see where 3 legs, what was going on!?!? J then discovered that Spot's collar had been a bit loose and somehow one of Spots front legs was stuck in his collar! What are the chances of that happening?!

Thankfully Spot was fine. He hadn't been in that predicament very long (I had fed him maybe 1/2 an hour ago and he could walk fine then). Once his leg was freed and his collar adjusted to the right size, he ran over to give us all a happy greeting.

*Phew*

This all happened so fast I did not get a picture of Spot in his rough spot with his collar. But since no post is really complete without a picture, here is a picture of Spot from the winter:

MPAF Jewel

I don't know that I've mentioned much about Jewel on this blog. Several months ago we made some changes on our farm with some animals coming and some going in an effort to mix up the genetic background of our herd. Jewel came to us from Ohio, and has an entirely different set of ancestors than we have represented on our farm. Some of her ancestors include 4Peruvian Chaval, 4Peruvian Misti, and 5Peruvian Quicksilver.

For those not familiar with alpacas, each alpaca can be registered. They receive an ARI certificate that states their official name, the farm they belong to, and their ancestry. (Along with other information like their registered color and date of birth).

Jewel is full Peruvian (which means all of her ancestors came from Peru). While we do not specialize in full Peruvian alpacas (we enjoy lineage from all countries), we do try to breed our full Peruvian girls to full Peruvian males so that we are able to offer full Peruvian lineage to farms that prefer that. We also find it interesting to see how our full Peruvian alpacas compare to the ones that aren't full Peruvian. I know there are people who swear full Peruvian is best, but in our experience those aren't the ones who have done that best in the show ring for our farm.

Jewel is a Dark Fawn girl. Her dam is white and her sire is bay black. This means she had to receive a fawn color from her dam and a black from her sire (or bay black). With her black secondary color, she could produce any color offspring (depending on what male she is bred to).

Jewel is now 5 years old and has never been bred. Well, we've bred her since she's been at our farm. We decided to breed her to our own Tucker, in hopes of producing a rose grey. The grey offspring can be tricky though. We know we also have a good chance of getting a fawn or a black cria. I haven't made it a secret that I LOVE the black alpacas so that would be great with me too!

Mystery

Kateri, Kateri, I don't know what is up with you:

Spit Testing and Breeding

It had been so hot we didn't want to get our males out to do the spit testing, but with cooler temps we felt we could do so. Then if we had an open female, we could breed them while we had the male there. We don't like to do breedings in hot weather since it's hard on the males (and could possible cause them to become sterile).

Spit testing is where you put a male in with a female you hope is pregnant. If the female cushes, she is open (not pregnant) and needs to be bred. If she runs, spits and is all around ornery, she's pregnant. We find different females act slightly different so it's helpful to know how your female typically acts to use this method of pregnancy testing.

We are happy to say that on Sunday when we spit tested our girls, we noted that Latte, Snickers, Sancha, and Maddie all tested as pregnant (poor Greyt was spit on by a bunch of girls). Victoria was going to be bred on Sunday anyway (she was not yet bred so we knew she was open). Miss Kitty also appears to be open. We don't know what is going on with Kateri (could she still be pregnant?). It was hard to tell with Jewel and Tehya, we aren't sure but thought both of them may be pregnant.

Up until this point we had males with no offspring on the ground. It's unknown what a male will produce, so typically with the males first year of breeding, we only breed him to one or two girls. That way we can get an idea of what he can produce before putting him on more of our girls. I know some farms will use one male on almost all of their girls, but we have resisted doing that in order to make sure we don't have an entire year of cria from one male (they could be awesome or not so awesome). Now that we have an offspring from our males ARF Our Peruvian Tucker (AKA Tucker) and SA Peruvian Greyt Exxpectations (AKA Greyt), we are excited to see what they can produce from a variety of girls. For this reason, we are breeding them each to several different girls to get an idea of what stamp the male puts on their offspring. (Tucker's offspring would be our own OHVNA The Challenger, and Greyt's offspring would be Our Peruvian Dark Thunder).

Here is our breeding schedule to date:

Snickers x Greyt (6/10/11)
Latte x Tucker (6/19/11)
Sancha x Greyt (6/19/11)
Maddie x Greyt (7/6/11)

Not sure they are pregnant:

Jewel x Tucker (7/5/11)
Tehya x Greyt (7/16/11)
Victoria x Tucker (8/13/11)

After the Rain

Early Saturday morning I woke up to the sound of thunder and quickly realized a storm was on it's way. Since we had just had cool enough weather to turn off our air conditioning, I jumped up to shut the windows that were at risk of having rain come in. I still didn't realize how much rain we were about to get. It was sometime around 3 a.m. that I heard the storm start, and when I finally got up at 8 a.m. it was still storming.

The storms stopped shortly after 8 a.m. Despite it being wet and humid out, I decided I would go for a run before the sun came up and it started getting hot. I seemed to be in slow motion because it was close to 10 a.m. before I got outside and began my run. I almost stopped at the 6 mile mark thinking enough was enough, but I pushed on to complete my usual weekly long run of 7 miles (I alternate which run I do, I have 4 that I rotate through each week, the 7 mile run being my longest). I was beat!

Just after noon more storms started to roll in. This time we not only had thunder, lighting, and down pouring rain, but we also had hail! It's funny how the alpacas, many of whom will lay outside during a snow storm, all find their way to the barn just before any rain falls. They seem to know when the storm is about to start. (I don't know why I did not get any pictures of the hail).

As the storm slows down, some of the more active alpacas will start to wander out of the barn. I think they get restless, since there is hay and water in the barn, they aren't leaving out of necessity. Rose and Twilight are often the first ones to venture out, usually followed by Maddie.

By the time the afternoon storms began, we started seeing puddles and standing water in our pastures. This is very usual given how sandy our soil is. I have never seen such a sanding of water on our land in the 10 years we've lived here. (I never got any pictures of our standing water either).

Early this morning, Sunday morning, we had another smaller storm pass over. This time no standing water.

I caught these pictures once we put out fresh dry hay this morning. These girls act like they haven't have a meal in days!




I find our current weather usual for August. Usually August is hot and humid, and by now the woods is starting to brown up a bit (like grass often does by late summer). The last few days have been cool, humid and wet. The woods are still very lush and green, yet the temperature feels more like September than August. Makes me wonder what sort of fall we are in for. Will it be an early fall? I hope not, as I am one who enjoys the summer and dreads the long dreary winters.

Hot and Tired

Like much of the country we've had a bit of a heat wave here. While temps are now back to more of a normal range (80's rather than 90+ degrees), it's still been humid and not very comfortable out there. The alpacas manage in the heat, but we make sure they have plenty of fresh cool water, fans to sit in front of, and we hose them off several times a day. In their native climate in South America they don't have temps this high and definitely not this humid.

One thing we don't like to do in the heat is breedings. Males can overheat and even become sterile in some cases. So we've been holding off on spit testing and re-breding any girl who is open. The down side to this is that we may end up with some late summer or even early fall due dates next year (since their gestation last about 11.5 months, if we breed in August/September, we'll have cria born in August/September next year). We really don't like cria born that late, given how cold it can get here in the fall months. It's hard to keep a young cria warm. But, mother nature isn't giving us much of a choice this year.

I love long summer days. I love the sun. I love the warmth. But even I have been struggling this past week. The first few really warm days I enjoyed, but it seems we haven't had a break back to normal temps in weeks. Just like the alpacas lay around on these hot summer days, I seem to be doing similar.

Yarn!

I finished this skein of Bo's fiber. I was just about done plying the two strands:



when I thought I was going to run out of room before it was done, the bobbin was stuffed full:



I pushed and pulled and managed to get it all on there. When I measured, it came out to 220 yards. I typically spin closer to 150-180 yards. This is a big skein for sure!