The power of adaptation

We had a pretty neat experience late this afternoon. 5P Cangalli, who is now our reigning herd elder, delivered what will be her final cria ever at the age of 17. While there is nothing terribly remarkable about an alpaca her age still being fertile and capable of carrying a pregnancy to full term, what is unique about this situation is the fact that our old girl’s vision has been degrading rather quickly over the past year to the point that we feel she is most likely completely blind now. Blind to the point that you can get your finger an inch from either of her eyes without her even blinking.

Alpacas being the natural survivors that they are, she’s been able up until now to glum onto another member of the herd using them almost the way a blind person uses a guide dog. She even learned from habit when to duck under the the closed upper half of the dutch doors we use during the winter at the Arena. We did have concerns though leading up to her due date this spring that if she were to birth out in a large group of other females as she has done in the past, that her lack of vision could really lead to a tricky situation with just too much sensory overload as her pen mates would undoubtedly be all over any newborn checking the little one out. To that end Cangalli and another one of our expectant mommas, Golden Bell, have been living together in the Arena’s warm room for the past 6 weeks or so. The idea was to create a smaller and more controlled situation with fewer variables. The girls were still allowed outside during the day under the warm room’s section of the Arena’s corral though we did lock the two of them inside during the night.

Well today was finally the day we’d been waiting for and though Cangalli needed Jen’s help to deliver her new baby, he was healthy and raring to go from the get-go. The only problem was that his mom couldn’t see him at all! As he was just starting to get his legs under him, Cangalli would mistakenly bump into him or even briefly step on the poor little dude before realizing it was her baby and backing off. She definitely knew it was her cria though. As far as we can tell the rest of her senses are as sharp as they have ever been. To that end Jen came up with the idea of tying a small bell around her baby’s neck so that she could hear where he was even if she couldn’t see him. Though it took me a little bit to search out and find what we were looking for, I finally came across a little bell on an old Christmas decoration we had inherited from my family over the years. Though I had some trepidation about cutting the bell off, I also figured it was going to the best of causes. As the video below shows, Cangalli ever the seasoned pro, can pretty easily follow her cria (who was less than 2 hours old at that point) around using the auditory clues from the bell. We’ll of course have to see how it goes in the coming days and weeks but right now we are cautiously optimistic that we’ve found a way for her to keep track of her cria without too much trouble or stress. Though as of 8PM we hadn’t witnessed the cria nursing independently yet — Cangalli was completely dreamy about letting a solo Jen put the the little guy under her so that he could be shown where his mom’s udder was — the fact that he was hopping and bopping around his mom (what is known in local parlance as “Merly whirling,” after Merlin, the first cria ever born here in 1998) leads us to believe that he probably already was. For our part, we have been taught yet another lesson about the amazing adaptive ability of alpacas. I’m sure it wont be the last time either.

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXrpccAm0sU