And here are our first additions, meet our new alpacas: Venus, Mercury and Saturn! Last week we posted on the DASH Facebook page asking for two more guard/pet alpacas, either castrated males or non-breeding females to join Neptune and Jupiter (it being better to keep alpacas in threes or more). The lovely Nigel Retallick responded and somehow, due to his very persuasive messages, we have ended up with 2 (possibly) pregnant females and a 4 week old cria!!!!
And guess what: we could not be more delighted. Saturn (mum) does not have the best quality fleece (hence Nigel wanting to sell her on) and so by default neither do Venus (her daughter from 2014) nor Mercury (the cria). This matters not a jot to us! We WON’T breed from them again but will hopefully have the delights of raising a couple of cria next summer and then the joys/agonies of wondering whether to sell them on or keep them.
Saturn is very friendly which is just as well as we need to feed her concentrates whilst she is nursing Mercury (she is a tad thin). If she was shy it would be very hard to get her to eat without all the others (including the very greedy Pickle, our 5 year old Anglo Nubian X goat) stealing the food. Fortunately she is very happy to be hand fed or even eat straight from the jug.
Neptune and Jupiter are delighted with their new family and after much sniffing, following and playful mounting, the five of them trotted off together down the bottom of the field with Mercury being suitably guarded on all 'four' sides!!