The East Coast is experiencing record breaking heat this week. When the heat and humidity get too high we help keep the alpacas cool by running fans in the barn, providing plenty of cool water and offering baths from the garden hose. The alpacas come running when they hear the hose turned on. Check out the video clip below to see some of our alpacas enjoying a hose down.

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We recently attended a workshop on skirting, sorting and grading alpaca fiber offered by Wini Labrecque and hosted by Spruce Ridge Farm. Wini is a AOBA certified Alpaca fleece judge. The one and a half day workshop covered everything from shearing alpacas to collecting, grading and skirting the fleece. The primary goal was to learn how to sort and grade to (1) seperate fleece into more uniform groups based on fiber characteristics such as color, length and fineness, (2) reduce waste in processing and reduce processing costs, and (3) create a more uniform quality end product such as yarn and roving. We’re currently using what we learned to process our own fleeces from this years shearing and look forward to processing the fleece into improved yarn products this year.

Wini Labrecque lectures on sorting and grading alpaca fleece

Class participants practice what they've learned from Wini

Our girl Caroline had a cria (baby alpaca) yesterday. The cria is a solid white boy that weighed 19 pounds when born. He is the first of 3 crias that we expect this season (Petula and Sasha are still expecting). The video clip below is a 2 minute summary of the birth that took about 20 minutes in real time. As you’ll see if you watch the video, the other girls in the pasture take a real interest in the birth of the new cria!

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Alpacas are shorn each spring to remove their thick winter fleece. The harvested fleece can then be processed into the lovely alpaca yarn or roving that you may be familiar with. This year we decided to do the shearing ourselves. The video clip below shows one of our girls (Galena) having her blanket shorn. The blanket is considered the prime fleece and generally extends from the base of the neck to the rump and includes both sides. As you will see in the video, alpacas need to be restrained during shearing. This is for the protection of the alpaca and the people doing the shearing as otherwise they would likely thrash their legs around. Once restrained, however, the alpacas generally remain quite calm during the shearing process. We would like to thank Michael Truss of Alpacas of Maggies Brook Farm and Hannah Ingleston for helping us with the shearing – it’s definitely not a 2 person job!

DISCLAIMER: This is not a ‘how-to’ video! We are novice shearers having shorn no more than a dozen alpacas at this point. Although shearing is easy enough to do once you’ve been trained, we would highly recommend that you attend a shearing clinic before trying it yourself. In our case we attended a clinic offered by Matt Best that was held at Light Livestock Equipment and Supply.

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This video clip shows the girls at Thorn Hill Alpacas grazing in their pasture (April 2010). The video was taken before the girls have been shorn for the season. We plan to shear soon and will post another video showing the girls newly shorn so you can see the difference. Also, several of these girls are pregnant and expecting crias soon so we will soon be posting video clips of our newest arrivals. So, please check back soon!

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