Thursday, May 17, 2007

Wow, it’s time for shearing again. This time of year is filled with a variety of emotion from anticipation all the way to anxiety, but mostly anticipation. More on the “anxiety” part later.

We eagerly anticipate the new cria. Every year it is so exciting to see the first one poke HER head out and join the world. Will it be a girl or a boy? Will it be the color we anticipate or something completely unexpected? Did you know that all things being equal (they never are), a white alpaca bred to color has about a 67% chance of producing a colored cria? Just a bit of trivia, but I digress. The last three years we have been lucky enough to start off cria season with a girl, and blessed enough to start off with a healthy girl. Now it’s a clean slate. As I write this we are waiting on four overdue cria, the latest of which is 358 days (we plan for 342 days). Last year the same mom went 336 days so go figure. We also anticipate another 6 in June. Speaking of late term females, this is by far the best time of the year to purchase females. For more on this click this link and download the PDF article entitled “Very Pregnant Females”. You can also see a list of our pregnant females here.

Enter anxiety: In this neck of the woods shearing comes right around the last week in May. We don’t want to shear too much before that because of the seemingly annual occurrence of a late freeze. But, and it’s a big BUT (no, not BUTT), we also want to shear before the temperature start’s to climb into the nineties. At least the humidity can be relied upon to be somewhere below 25%. This is where we sometimes feel like we’re rolling the dice.

Ideally we would breed in late June so we can expect late May/early June cria. This timing gives the cria a good head start before the inevitable August heat wave, plus they will develop enough of a fleece that the onset of winter is no problem. But this presents us with a new problem. The dreaded shearing of late term females! In the past we’ve just gone ahead and sheared. They had to be shorn and the shearer is only here for two days. By the way, we don’t have much say as to when the shearer will be here. She hit’s the Nevada ranches on her way through to the next state and we better be ready. “Let’s just go ahead and do it”, we’d say with our fingers crossed. Well, last year the first female to have a cria after shearing had a stillborn. It was devastating, but we must learn from our mistakes.

This year we’re bringing in a different shearer in late June or early August for all of the “late termers”. Any alpaca that is due in June plus any cria that are at least 30 days old will get the late shearing. Yes, we’ll have to keep all of them cool through June. We have plenty of shade trees and plenty of hoses. We’ll make it, and hopefully, so will all of the moms and cria. We’ve also made a conscious decision to avoid July cria so any females shorn in late May/early June are not due for at least two months. And now we wait, with much anticipation and a little anxiety. We’ve done what we think is best. We can live with that. Surely, this is paradise!

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