Alpaca Colors

I recently saw a link to this handy chart about the percentage of each alpaca's fiber color (from the alpaca registry website).


Primary Color Distribution

Color	Number of Alpacas	Percentage
White	47,063	25.8
Medium Brown	18,589	10.2
Medium Fawn	18,496	10.1
True Black	17,952	9.8
Light Fawn	16,928	9.3
Dark Brown	11,531	6.3
Beige	10,614	5.8
Dark Fawn	10,014	5.5
Bay Black	7,891	4.3
Light Brown	7,867	4.3
Medium Silver Grey	4,499	2.5
Medium Rose Grey	3,379	1.8
Dark Silver Grey	2,354	1.3
Light Silver Grey	1,810	1
Dark Rose Grey	1,802	1
Light Rose Grey	1,719	0.9
Unknown	173	0.1

What I found so neat about this, is that some of our alpacas are in the minority (<2% range).  

I previous created this page, listing each of our alpacas by color.

We have a rare Light Rose Grey, Enlightenment's Rocky Rose (I don't have her ARI on hand right now, so I don't know if she actually got registered Light Rose Grey or Medium Rose Grey, I'd say she's light but sometimes at the time of registering it's a tough call to make, and I notice on her Alpaca Nation page she's listed as medium, she's rare either way).  We have two Dark Rose Greys, our own OHVNA The Challenger and Our Peruvian Thunder.  We have a Light Silver Grey, our herdsire ARF Our Peruvian Tucker.  We have a Medium Rose Grey, another herdsire SA Peruvian Greyt Exxpectations.   That's 5 out of our herd of 25 that are rare ~ pretty stacked odds.

I do realize that this chart is based off of how the animal is registered, not necessarily the actual color. As I mentioned, their colors can change over time.  For example our own Twilight was born looking True Black like her dam.  We registered her as True Black.  But by the time she was ready for attending alpaca shows we realized she was a dark silver grey.  It also can happen that some people aren't very good at identifying the alpaca's fiber color, which sometimes was done by a previous owner.  But I figure errors are made many ways so it all balances out to give an rough idea of what colors are in the registered national alpaca herd.

I am still missing alpaca fiber in medium brown (the second most common color, that I am missing, oh the irony), bay black and medium silver grey.  Maybe we'll get some cria to fill in those colors this year :)