Featured Alpaca of the Week: Sakura

I'd like to introduce you to Sakura. What a sweet lady Sakura is. And the best alpaca mom you'll ever find. She just loves being a mom! And it's so easy for her, too. She is incredibly patient and extremely strong and healthy. I've always liked Sakura's "Beatles" forelock.




Sakura has had four cria; Shabazz, Emily, Shazamm, and Dulcinea. Each cria's birth has been easy as pie - in fact, with Sakura it's always been you look out and there's a new cria in the field nursing! No muss, no fuss. And she just looks at you like, "What are you getting all excited about?"




Here's a picture of Emily and Sakura a week after Emily was born.



Sakura's fleece is buttery soft with a micron count of 25. I've got about 8 lbs of it that I'm in the process of skirting. I can hardly wait to see the resulting yarn! It's very dense fleece and will be absolutely dreamy blended with merino and silk.

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Endophytes on the Mind

Who knew? The county extension agent tells us we can test for endophytes in our pasture grass (yes, I've got endophytes on the brain). Endophytes are fungi that live symbiotically in fescue and apparently are bad for alpacas to eat during the last trimester of their pregnancies. They can cause abortions, thickened placenta, and other problems with the pregnancies. But we can send a sample of the pasture grass into a lab at the University of Kentucky to test for endophytes in the fescue that makes up the majority of our pasture grass. So now I have this mental image of some lab worker taking a scapel to a piece of grass and slitting it open to find a horrible little alien looking wormy thing inside that jumps out and hisses (ATTACK OF THE ENDOPHYTE!)

I was looking through my collection of alpaca pictures and found this one of Valentina with her cria Wailea on the day that Wailea was born. Wailea was born with one normal kidney but the other kidney was not attached to the bladder so when the abnormal kidney filled the urine would just disseminate into her little body causing horrible infections. We would treat the infection with antibiotic but the infection would reoccur every two weeks. When she was two months old, we had the vet remove the abnormal kidney. She seemed perfectly fine and looked like she was going to have a totally normal alpaca life until she was about six months old when the scar tissue from the kidney removal operation blocked her intestines. She died at six months.

Excuse me, I'm going to go have a little cry now.

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