It's not easy, being green.....

What part of "I'm PREGNANT" don't you understand????

Here is my Jemma, gooey from spitting off her prospective date.

Spitting you say?? What??!! Yup, alpacas spit --gasp--

There are many types of spit- it's how they communicate. They can't talk using an actual language, so they communicate through body language and, well, spitting. Let's sort them into categories, shall we?

1) There's the "you don't want to go there" fake out spit, where the paca looks menacingly over their shoulder at the other paca (who is usually sniffing under their tail) and lays their ears back. Sometimes this is accompanied by a 'pre-chew' as well, where they chew their cud rapidly to warn of impending projectiles. Usually the annoying paca leaves, but sometimes they persist, whereupon the faker then unloads on the annoying pest.

2) The "this is my space/food/shade/cria (fill in the blank)" air warning spit. This spit doesn't carry any green material, but is only air and is just a warning. But it does come with impressive posturing!

3) The "I'm 11 months pregnant, don't even LOOK at me full-on, full of green- can last up to 10 minutes or until all parties involved walk around with droopy lip and green drool due to excessive 'spittiness'- attack. This is my personal favorite. I have witnessed this every year as my pregnant girls get imminently due and these are pretty funny to behold. I can guarantee you I do not exaggerate when I say it can all start with an innocent look in the preggos general direction. Since alpacas are obligate nasal breathers, the smell from all that green causes the droopy lip and open mouth like the female above.

4) Then there is the "I'm pregnant" spit. You don't even want to know, believe me...

See, alpacas can be bred all year round, they ovulate regularly- and can be 'induced' by the actual act of breeding them. So, we as breeders do what we call behavior testing.

It goes something like this:

Princess to Die For gets haltered up for a date with Prince Charming for the first time and they are introduced.

Princess runs around, flirting and playing hard to get, while Prince tries his darndest to 'convince' Princess he's The Man by chasing her and orgling (the sound males make during this act) and trying to jump on her.

Eventually Princess decides he is the man of her dreams (or she just gets tired of running) and she drops down for a love filled interlude that ideally lasts about 20-40 minutes. Sometimes there are multiple females lined up outside the love nest, and that makes it really easy for us 2 leggers to guess which females are not pregnant, little hussies. :))

7 days pass and we introduce Princess to Prince again. We either get a repeat performance, or Princess spins around the nanosecond Prince enters the arena and blasts him full on in the face with really green spit. Prince can either a) retreat with his dignity intact, or b) continue to pursue Princess in the hopes that eventually his charm and his lovely baritone orgling will win her over. Usually he fails miserably and goes back to the boy's pen covered in green slime where he is greeted like a conquring hero anyway because, well, they are boys.

When we get continued results that end up with the female spitting off the male for 45 days, we ultrasound to see little Junior/Juniorette floating peacefully in his/her amniotic fluid, and then we resort to spit testing every 30 days until about 6 months to make sure the pregnancy doesn't slip. Roughly 345 days later, it's stork time.

Some females I have are as reliable as clocks. They breed once or twice, and then they spit and I know they are pregnant. I don't even have to ultrasound or pull blood.

See the picture above? That was my Jemma, who now lives in Texas. As you can see, she is pregnant in this picture! She was very reliable. So is my Osita. Never has to be bred more than once, even with inexperienced herdsires, and tells me she is pregnant very clearly.

I have never had to ultrasound her in the 10 years I have owned her.

Others, like first time maidens, are not as reliable. They may spit, then drop and continue to spit. Or, run and not drop, but not spit either. Generally first timers get a US on our ranch. By the second time around, they are usually more reliable with spit testing.

The humorous part in all this is the human element. I mean, we take the girls to the boys or however we are doing it this time, and then we monitor the ritual closely.
Well, some of my girls take it closer than I would like. They know me, and trust me, therefore when they are pregnant, they run to me to save them from the big scary Macho chasing them. I am sure you can see where I am going with this... I usually get green myself. It is quite comical, I'm told, to see me ducking and running from said harassed female who in her great desire to flee the pen forgets to turn her head to aim the spit his way, causing me to dodge the great flying green as I go. For the record, while it is only green food that is partially digested, it stinks, stains, and causes me to run around with my mouth open drooling, trying not to breath in the fumes too.

To let you know, my alpacas do not spit on me intentionally for no reason. Occasionally I am involved in a food fight, or domestic dispute through merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the only time I have ever been spit on intentionally was while weighing a female's brand new cria (What are you doing with my baby???!!!) or giving a shot in the butt, and let's be honest, wouldn't we all like to spit at our doctor when that happens to us??

On to my Arwen Undomiel. It is fall 2006, and she is spitting, and spitting... and isn't pregnant. Last real breeding was 9 months ago, and we thought she was pregnant, but no, the ultrasound in August says, not so much.


Now Arwen needs a guy who doesn't get discouraged easily. She doesn't like breeding, and will sometimes spit even as she is dropping for breeding. Enter Luxor- he is a "yes means no" kind of Macho.
In very early August (4 days before the ultrasound to be exact) during a cool spell we had tried her again. She dropped for a breeding! Trouble is, it only lasted 5 minutes... tops. Then she popped up like a Jack in the Box and was done.
Now Luxor is potent, and he has a nice, er, um, "set" but 5 minutes is really not going to cut it. The actual time it takes the male to reach the right spot is pretty long, both in distance and in actual time, not to mention the rest of the act required for pregnancy to result.

So, come October we are thinking, she has got to be open still, and we start trying again in the cooler weather. She is acting so pregnant, and we are unable to convince her she couldn't possibly get pregnant from a >5 minute breeding. So we look over her behavior all year long, and consider she might have a retained CL making her think she is pregnant when she's not, and talk to the vet about using a hormone to dislodge it, but we would never do this without another ultrasound to make sure there isn't really a cria in there. The most common reason for being unreceptive, is pregnancy! Hearing horror stories about breeders who use Estrumate, thinking their female is not really pregnant, and then the next day finding a dead cria in the pasture were not needed for us, we know better.
So here we go for yet another ultrasound.... and lo an behold, she is pregnant!

Ah, the joys of being a breeder. The ups, the downs, the spits and misses. The sting of being wrong....... who knew what we were really in for 10 years ago? Not I.

The moral of the story? When you breed alpacas, wear rain gear and protective face covering, or risk getting covered in green slime..... um, nope, that's not it.......

When in doubt, trust your female and get an ultrasound, or, two or three. LOL, and yes, nearly immaculate conception is entirely possible.
Oh, and Go Luxor!!

Tune in next week for the "How to Drive Your 2-legger Crazy with False Labor" chapter. I laughed, I cried.... it moved me, and it will you too!
Slainte~
Rachelle

of Alpacas and Kings

Aren't I cute??

BMAR's Fanny Bryce 19 months old- she's for sale!BMAR's Heathertoes- 7 months old

BMAR's Rosie Cotton-4 months old- smiling at you!
BMAR's Quickbeam (formerly known as Little boy- also 4 months)- "Is this thing on??"
A beautiful picture of a colt taken by my friend Holly Zech who breeds Fresians (someday I'm going to have one!)

So today I thought I'd share what picture taking is like on the ranch. Oh, and some other stuff too I am sure. Taking pictures of alpacas is always a challenge, as you can see there are many types or alpacas. There are the hams- take Quickbeam for example and his eyeball. He gets as close to the camera as he can, and then I can't get a good shot of him. Or he stands there with his ears down and it looks like he's some kind of weird earless alpaca or something. You can just hear them singing "I'm too sexy for my fleece, too sexy for my fleece, that's why I'm such a tease...." as they pose and prance around. (oh great.... now I'm gonna have that song stuck in my head all day.... yikes!!)

There are the ones who love to get in the way. Osita comes to mind... nobody better get in the way of her and her buddy- me- when I'm in the pen. Lovely sentiment Osita girl, and certainly I feel the same way dear but it makes picture taking extremely difficult when your big butt is in the way, or you are chewing your cud breath in my face as I am trying to get that perfect shot... of somebody else.....

There are the alpacas who would rather eat nails then get close to a 2-legger, fortunately I don't have too many of those. They require the zoom lense and a steady hand... and Osita nowhere in the vicinity.

Then there are alpacas like Hally, who can't stand still for more than a minute and always move at the last nano second from the perfect pose to the utterly ridiculous. Mouth askew chewing, bulging cheeks regurgitating cud, one eye open and shaking their head, etc... My boy Luxor comes to mind. I don't think I have but one good picture of him- and he is going to be 8 in February. He looks like a total dork in every picture I have.

Some alpacas are just naturally photogenic- like Rosie Cotton. She looks cute in every picture I take of her. She even smiles for the camera!

The other day I was having a bad day. I have been having so much trouble with my neck and back. In 2004 I was in a serious car accident that left me with hematomas in my chest, the ligaments that hold the ribs to the chest wall torn, three discs bulging in my neck, a fractured tailbone, bruising that went all the way to the bone in my chest, torn ligaments in my shoulder, two front teeth chipped, a slight concussion and kept me completely out of commission for 6 months. I was driving 55 in cruise control and someone made a left turn in front of me. I didn't even have time to hit the brakes- I just hit him. Literally I was saved by the airbag. After physical therapy for almost a year, the pain became manageable- albeit constant- and I was just starting to get back into the routine of being able to work out, be outside with the alpacas, and um, sounds silly, but carry things. Then in August of last year someone hit me again. This time on my own dirt road for Pete's sake. It flared up everything, injured my neck even further, and has made my life difficult (said with teeth gritted) again.

Having a neck injury is really a pain, er, in the neck! I'll never forget what the neurologist said when he got the MRI results back. "I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is- it's not bad enough for surgery. The bad news is, it's not bad enough for surgery." See, surgery can fix the problem 99% of the time. If your injury isn't bad enough for surgery (although there is a high probability that with a neck injury that is non surgical, it will require surgery later down the line) then you just have to live with the pain, and hope you don't hurt it further. So here I am back in PT again and now my low back hurts too- just to shake things up a little LOL.

I don't say all this to get a poor Rachelle response, just to give you some insight into how badly my life was disrupted and how much I missed doing the regular things I took for granted before the first accident. Like carrying things, lifting, vaccuming..... okay, that- not so much.... sitting and standing, walking and spending loads of time with the alpacas.

So, back to the story- bad day, I go outside to take some pictures of the paca crias and in 5 minutes I forget all about myself and am immersed in them. Their smells, the way they crowd around to see if there are carrots hidden in my pockets, the way the crias come over to sniff me bravely then run away shouting, "Ha-ha!! I touched the 2-legger, bet you can't do it!

I forget all about having no money, the car trouble, the neck pain, the teenager worries, everything, and just become Pacamomma. Don't know any other job in the world that will do that for you. Cool beans.

Right now we have one alpaca for sale. We didn't want to have to sell any for a couple of years, but with Codi needing some medical tests, our roof still having a hole, and us still trying to rebound from the last layoff- we have to. We agonized about who to sell, I hate selling anyone! But we have sold 10 animals in the eight years we have been in business. It doesn't get any easier, let me tell you. We decided to sell Fanny. Fanny is a special girl to my daughter. See, two years ago we had every one of our girls but one deliver early. It was a terrible winter, so much rain, and it was impossible to find good hay because everything was ruined. We let everyone out on our seasonal grass as often as we could, it is possible there was some fescue in the grass mix that caused the early births, I don't know for sure. Although everyone's crias came a little early, my Osita girl delivered a beautiful big, black female cria 6 weeks early- by far too early. She had no teeth erupted, her ears were tipped down, she was down on her pasterns, and wasn't interested in eating, with no suck reflexes- classical preemie. We did everything we could, supplementation, plasma, antibiotics, milking out mom and trying to get her to latch on- but nothing we did helped and at 7 days old she died in my husband's arms as we were rushing to the vet in the middle of the night.

Codi had really bonded with this little one, and she was going through such a hard time with her own medical troubles, and feeling so crappy herself, we broke with tradition of naming after Tolkien and let her name her after her favorite character in a movie; Fanny Bryce. When Fanny died it broke Codi's heart. The wonderful community that we belong to (the alpaca one that is) rallied around Codi, sending her cards, letters, and pictures of their crias to help her through.

Enter this Hally, whom we originally named Eowyn. She was her momma's first cria, and mom's milk didn't come in the really well until the third day- often happens with first time moms. So we supplemented with colostrum and goat milk until it did- or should I say, Codi supplemented. She bonded with this little one and begged to be able to name her Fanny- in memory of the one we had lost. So that's how Fanny got her name. And that's why it is so hard to think of selling her. But you know what? I could tell you stories about each and every one of our alpacas, so like I said- it doesn't get any easier. All we can do is make sure they go to good homes and stay in contact with their new owners. Which is why my favorite customer is Holly- who has the Fresians. She is totally awesome in so many ways, but especially in how she keeps me a part of my Catalina's life, and I sold her to Holly 5 years ago! I know about every cria, and every moment- it is wonderful.

I am so truly blessed to have these extraordinary animals in my life. They are so healing, so peace inspiring, and so beautiful. Everyone should have some!

With my neck trouble, we talked about seriously downsizing. It broke my heart to even think about it! I had to say no. So now we are just trying to sell one a year. This is the first year we will have 4 of our own females due with crias. Also, we have seven females total- a record for us! I can't wait for cria season to begin!

So, I will close now with this thought. Even Al, who was a rescue alpaca with the personality of a demon possessed badger when he came, and has a face only a blind mother could love has found his way into our hearts. With training he has come around to understand that he won't be hurt, and doesn't have to be a butthead to get what he wants.

We like to call him: The King- (duh-duh-duuuuh..duh-duh-duh- ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building) because he expects us to treat him like royalty- and so we do.

Happy alpaca dreams to you!

Till next time,

Slainte~
Rachelle

What do you do with an alpaca??

This blog is dedicated to my friend, Cozmic. Because long ago I was asked what I do with my alpacas, and all I can say is, the internet ate my answer....

Seriously!! I wrote out this lovely answer that took me about an hour, and then after I hit the publish blog button, it said it couldn't find the connection and the blog disappeared into cyberspace.

So, here it is my friend!

Hay Cozmic!

I get to name the ones born on my ranch. We have a herd identifier: BMAR (Black Magic Alpaca Ranch) and all of our alpacas are registered with our national registry ARI- Alpaca Registry Inc.

We name all our 'characters' after the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit books- my very favorite books growing up. With the exception of Fanny Bryce- my daughter got to name her! So far we have had: Elrond, Pippin, Bilbo Baggins, Mithril (one of our llamas actually) Tinuviel, Elanor, Nenya, Lady Galadriel, Arwen Undomiel, Gil Galad, Faramir, Heathertoes, Mithrandir and Earendil..... I think that's it. I have one white male who doesn't have a name yet. Sometimes they just pop out and we know right away. Other times it takes a while, hmmm, that one isn't a Hobbit, is she Elven royalty? No.... what about an Ent, or a Ranger? LOL.

Not all alpacas are registered, but most alpacas are. It isn't a requirement, but it is good business, and reputable breeders always register. Registered alpacas cost more, for good reason. Their ancestry can be traced, and they are all DNA typed, making them more desirable. The Alpaca Registry just recorded their 100,000th alpaca registered! So our industry is indeed growing here in North America.

There isn't anyone who says which alpaca is 'okay' and which is not. A good breeding program speaks for itself, and good stock is easily recognized. There are books out there by industry experts that are all known for their recognition of what makes an alpaca an alpaca, like correct conformation, ear shape, topline and body structure. Some alpacas look "cuter" than others, but I have had older, less attractive alpaca ladies here on my ranch that provided me with the most spectacular offspring when the right breeding decisions have been made. Conversely I have seen some really great looking alpacas spit out some not so great looking crias. It is all based on phenotype and genotype and the hallmark of a good male or female is in the progeny they create.

There are two types of alpacas, the suri- which has long locks that are very lustrous and silky and hang down from the body, and huacayas- that have crimpy fleece and look like fuzzy teddy bears. We have two suri males, one gelding and one breeding male, and the rest of our herd are huacayas. Someday I want some suri females!

There is a funny video out there of someone spit testing with a snorkel on :)) I think it is an Aussie production LOL. I suggested rain gear because yellow and green are so festive together.... ha-ha.

Yes, alpacas produce one of the finest natural fibers in the world, 22 natural colors, very, very soft. And we shear them every year, once per year. I send out my fleece to get it processed into yarn and my mother in law crochets it for us. Above here are pictures of some of the wonderful things she makes. Not me, give me a crochet needle and I will poke my eye out with it.

I can spin, and do have a wheel- what I don't have is the time to do it! I want to learn how to weave, it is a dream of mine. Anyone wanna get me a loom for Christmas?? --wink-wink--

In our first three years of production we bred solely for black alpacas, and were successful at it 100%. Now, we want them in all colors! We have had crias in black, white, three shades of fawn, various grays- including rose gray, and next year are hoping for more gray and fawn.

We make all the decisions regarding matings. The boys and girls are kept seperately, and we move our little boys out from their mommas and girlfriends before they turn 1 year old.

Breeding decisions are based on several things, like- what color we would like, fiber characteristics, density of fleece, desirable dispositions, and overall conformation of the animal. If princess to Die For needs more density, and we would like to see straighter front legs, we will choose Prince Charming based on those characteristics.

If Lady Fire Breather needs an attitude adjustment, we will factor this in our decision when deciding her mate- with a gentle temperament in mind.

The future of our industry is indeed in the fleece. Building a viable and sustainable North American fiber industry is what every breeder is contributing to at this time. There are a few coops out there, the largest being the Alpaca Fiber Coop of North America- AFCNA where the members send in a portion of their clip every year and in return get shares in the coop and product at wholesale.

I hope this has answered some of your questions! If you want to know more about anything, just let me know okay?

Slainte~
Rachelle