Update on Victor

I always have the best of intentions when it comes to updating the blog, and then one thing or another comes up and time gets away from me...

Our new "surprise" cria Victor is already a couple of weeks old and is doing great! Although his mother was originally not allowing him to nurse, we were able to get her more comfortable with letting him practice nursing from her. Unfortunately, Victor felt that he was getting milk more easily from the bottle so he loses interest in nursing from his mom. So here we go with a bottle-fed male cria. We tried every day to get him to nurse on his own while supplementing with the bottle, but we could see that it just wasn't going to work.

Fortunately we were able to get enough of his mother's colostrum the first day. We also gave him his mother's milk for a few days by milking her. Ultimately though, we've been feeding him milk replacer five times each day and he's steadily gaining weight and is a very eager eater.

We're on cria watch again...this time it's Misty. She's looking as though she'll give us a new cria soon so I'll post it as soon as she delivers the goods! Take care all.

Everybody's birthday!

Well, August 18th proved to be quite a day for us at Hidden Pond Farm! It was our mother's birthday as well as our great-nephew's birthday...and then it became "Victor's" birthday.

Don't let the pink jacket fool you, that's a male cria in the photo. My calculations must have been off because I didn't expect this cria for at least another couple of weeks. Unfortunately, Victor's mom has not been very cooperative about feeding him so we are supplementing him with a colostrum powder mixture as well as milk we've gotten from his mom.

It has been a busy couple of days. I'll update you more later this week...

Wet hay

This is a picture of our wet hay on the field. Since this past weekend, the weather reports had shown a sunny 5-day forecast so we started cutting hay on Tuesday. Then I believe there was a 30% chance of rain in the forecast for Friday. Last night on the news, we saw a 50% chance of rain. I was hoping the rain would bypass Marinette so that we could get our hay dried and baled, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.

During the night and this morning, we received a significant amount of rain. If it clears up soon, maybe we can salvage our hay on the field without any problems. All we need is some sunshine and a nice breeze to hopefully dry it out. I'm not getting my hopes up though.

The alpacas, however, are enjoying the rain after several days of hot, humid weather.

Warm days of August

After a cool July, we've started August with warm days and lately, very humid weather. We've gotten lots of heavy rain, too. We're still holding out for more hay baling weather and hopefully we'll be able to do just that by this weekend.

I'm noticing a lot of toenails that need trimming lately. We'll have to get those taken care of when we give Ivermectin shots over the next week.

The Results Are In!!

Yay, pretty ribbons! Our first ever fleece show entries did well. Leroy received a 1st Place Blue Ribbon in the juvenile suri male indefinite color class. Lucas received a 3rd Place White Ribbon in his juvenile suri male light color class. The judge also commented that Lucas has "Great Luster!"

We didn't receive the DVD from the AFCNA Fleece Show yet, but I'm sure they are still editing from this past weekend's show. It will be nice to see the comments from the judges on the DVD. One area where I know we have to do better next time is to include more fiber. We scored low on fleece weight. I'm thinking I didn't bag enough fiber from the blanket area and may have thrown some of that fiber into my bag for leg and neck fiber during shearing.

We'll definitely get better at this, but at least our fleeces did well in spite of my mistakes! I'm really glad we finally entered a fleece show. Now that we've gotten the first one done, it doesn't seem as hard to do and we learn as we go. If you've never entered a fleece show or spin-off before, give it a try...you can't win if you don't enter.

Leroy asks...

As you know, we entered our first fleece show recently. Leroy and Lucas (left to right) aren't the only ones anxiously awaiting the results of this past weekend's AFCNA Fleece Show. Hopefully we properly prepared our entries. We'll just have to be patient for the results.

Other than that, we are waiting for a few days in a row of dry weather so that we can cut and bale more hay. We had a lot of heavy rain this past week and I admit, we really needed it. But now, we need some baling weather. There's a 70% chance of rain tomorrow so we won't be cutting any hay tonight for weekend baling. That's probably alright since the temperature is supposed to get into the 90's over the weekend. It's not fun stacking hay in hot temps like that! Maybe next week will be better.