Alpaca News
Alpaca Birthing 2011
All the Fowberry cria are now born with the arrival of Romily and Rhona and we are thankful as it has been a bit of an unusual and eventful year. Our females normally only birth after they have had their breakfast in the morning, this year we had four births at dawn and this wasn't because of the heat.
Again this year, over-long gestations were problematical for maidens, the longest being in Spring at 376 days. After a lot of number crunching on gestation lengths over many previous years, we have decided to let all our births fall back to June onwards, thereby missing out the freezing winds and cold in May and maiden females, in particular, hanging on to their pregnancies for far too long.
Babes this year are: Rio, Rosa, Romeo, Ruby, Richeburg, Royal Romance, R
hiannon, Regal Lily, Renegade, Roxanne, Rubens, Renoir, Rebel, Rhona and Romily.
A touching end to our birthing season happened after we had concluded that any prospective births were finished for the day by 5.30pm. We went inside, had tea, put the red wine on the Aga and then at 6.30pm, Jenny took out a cria coat to put on the youngest cria for the night. A little maiden jumped in front of Jenny, wide-eyed, anxious and humming loudly - totally unlike her character. It turned out she had her cria's head and two legs out, but she needed help with the chest and she had thought that the blue cria coat was the birthing bag. She lay straight down and kept as still as a mouse 
while lubrication was applied and she could continue to a happy conclusion - tiny, beautiful and very white Rhiannon (by Fowberry Lucien).
