Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Rain, rain, go away....

I can not even believe that I am complaining about the rain after our long summer draught but it has been raining for 4-5 days straight now. The areas around the barn where the animals come in and out are slick with mud... I sink in at least 6 inches deep in the cow pasture! Only last month this ground was cracked it was so dry. I love we are getting rain... I just wish we would have a day or two of dry weather in between.

Anyway, this morning Ed Kinser from Enchanted Hills Alpacas (the farm we purchased the alpacas Celtic Woman and Peter Piper from as well as our three Nigerian Dwarf Goats and some of our chickens too) drove down to our farm from VA. He was here to look at our 8 month old female alpaca, Celia. We are hopefully going to be making a trade with Ed with Celia for his breeding male Derwydd Peruvian Novio. The Kinser's are breeding for appaloosas and Novio just doesn't fit their breeding plan and I have always liked him and planned to breed Celtie to him this month anyway.

Derwydd Peruvian Novio

So, Ed was down here looking at Celia and her mom Gritona. I mentioned that I wasn't sure if Gritona was bred or not and Ed piped up that he had his portable ultrasound machine in the car and he would be more then happy to check her for me. (It is the visible kind not the audible kind.) Ed said that he would be more then happy to check all my girls if I wanted as it didn't take very long. (Ed also understandably stated that he couldn't be responsible for the accuracy of the results as he is not a vet.)

We checked Gritona who is 6 months along and determined she was pregnant, then we did Eloise who is 3 months along and found her to be pregnant as well. We then did Fiore and not surprisingly we didn't see anything that would make us believe she was pregnant. Then, finally, we did Noodle as she just hasn't "looked" pregnant to me and I have not been able to feel any fetal movements at all when I have checked over the last few weeks. Well, Noodle came up as open as well.

I was a bit disapointed in not getting a cria out of Noodle this year. Things like this happen when you raise livestock. If this deal goes through with Novio I plan to just pasture breed him to all 5 of our open girls in January... next December will be busy!

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