Our first Suris

We have two new alpacas - Ciara and Plunkett (formerly Popham Acoria and Quelvehin Ghost) to fit in with our Irish names theme for our llamas and alpacas. They are Suri alpacas. Seamus, Brendan and Amelie are all huacayas. Suris have a very different fleece from huacayas - it is fine, lustrous and naturally falls into ringlets.
We collected mum and son from the Alpaca Delvelopment Association show at Vierzon at the weekend. We were delighted to see Plunkett win 2nd prize in his class! It was also great to see Steve and Jayne Parker, the people we bought our alpacas from, do increcibly well. They got best-in-show!
Here is a photo of Ciara and Plunkett. It's not a great one. They're in the stable at the moment, and every time I go in with the camera, they come trotting over at once and get too close. We'll be putting them outside tomorrow so I should be able to get some better photos soon.

A hair's breadth

I got a microscope for Christmas so that I can do regular coproscopies to keep an eye on any internal parasite problems my alpacas and llamas might be developing. Today I've used it to compare alpaca and llama hair. The top photo shows a llama hair at 50x magnification. It's one of Bernard's hairs.


In comparison, here are hairs from Seamus, an alpaca, at the same magnification. As you can see, they are much finer. I wouldn't have thought there would be so much difference. Fascinating!

Aisling of Les Fragnes

Windermere Lady Coulemelle gave birth to beautiful little Aisling on 20 November 2009. Isn't she amazing!

Seamus's new friend

Here is Seamus with a new friend, one of our visitors this summer.
The boys are having a busy time, with lots of treks at the moment. And Amélie is settling in very well. She's much braver than she used to be and has been accepted as one of the herd by our girls.

Meet Amélie

Here is Amélie the alpaca. She joined us from Alapgas de la Tille in Cote d'Or. She is settling in very well, and enjoys spending time in her 'boudoir', as you can see in this photo.

Half cut alpacas

It turned very hot this week so it was time to clip the alpacas thick wool. They weren't overly impressed so it took several sessions to get it completely finished. Here is Seamus halfway through:
And here's a finished Brendan - a little scary, but not too bad. I'm sure I'll get better at it!

Lulin, the boss

Little Lulin, our llama cria who is two months old, is the boss of our two alpacas. She's the ringleader. They'll often follow her round the field and put up with trying to eat their neckerchieves.