Antenatal Night

Well the lovely weather didn't last long did it, well not up north anyway, we are back to soggy wet alpacas and muddy gateways and channel.  Not ideal for showing visitors round, but that's alpaca farming it's not all sunshine and fluffy alpacas!

I didn't to ask permission to name today's visitors so I won't, but it was nice to listen their fantastic plans and see their enthusiasm for alpacas and Paul's toys, I'll let you work out which way round the enthusiasm was!  

Slightly embarrassing was my initial meeting; junky hands and soggy trousers from kneeing on the floor trying to deliver our first lamb of the year, very stuck and sadly dead.  Our sheep are not actually due for another 9 or 10 days yet but this blackie was obviously in a rush.  Fingers crossed things will improve when lambing starts properly.

The Scottish Black face ewes are due to start us off a week on Tuesday, followed by the lowlands, Ebony is first, due on Thursday 10th, as you can see she is quite a size.  She is one of my original three pet sheep so is getting on a bit now and has only ever had single tup lambs in the past so it will be interesting to see if she manages anything different this yet.

The Shetland sheep start on 21st April and some of those are huge too!!

Then the goaties should begin on 23rd.  The first alpaca officially due is Imala on 2nd May, she wouldn't pose on her own, but here she is with some of her friends, note her best friend Gabby to her left, they are always together.

Another of the early girls is Highland Rose, she is due 25th May however is already bulging and spending lots of time sat down so we will see how long she keeps her legs crossed!

Saying all that we have one girl who we are keeping a very close eye on at the minute, bonkers Carol.  She was Sunbursts very first conquest, and played very hard to get, however his persistence paid off and she was mated on 11th May.  Having not been the most cooperative at the initial mating we knew spit offs were not going to be the most reliable so she as scanned at the end of June; empty!  Not wanting to believe the vet and putting doubts into his mind we agreed  to scan her again with the next batch of scans.

She was scanned again at the end of July; empty!  This time we decided to Estrumate her, despite this she has still never sat for Sunburst or any other boys, we've tried a few having experiences some choosy girls in the past!  Carol goes absolutely nuts when the boys go in the pen let alone get close. 

This was Carol on Friday night, she has also gained 7.6kg in the last few months?!?!?  Think we might need another scan.

We actually weighed the all the main group of girls yesterday and there were some very interesting gains, the biggest gain in the last 6 months was Ursula, due at the end of May gaining 14.4kg.  The second biggest gain was from Sahara at 13.2kg who didn't actually think she was pregnant on the last round of spit offs last year. A scan may be required here too!