Birthed out!

Last week at this time there were still 5 of our females left to deliver their babies this year. While that would be all well and good in the early fall when nighttime temperatures don’t tend to drop much lower than the 40s, when there are crias due and there’s a hard frost on the ground with morning temps in the 20s, it can start to feel kind of dicey though. Thankfully we are equipped to deal with cold weather births, at least so long as we don’t have too many of them all at once (coughs, clears throat).

With the passing of the joyful event that was Hurricane Sandy, we moved those five remaining females all into the warm room at the Arena for safekeeping. Though they were still allowed to use the warm room’s outside corral during the daylight hours, come evening we locked them inside so that we weren’t risking a cold weather birth in the middle of the night. Nobody likes finding criacicles at 6 AM after all: bad for morale and the bottom line.

In any case, whether it was the lingering effects of low barometric pressure from the hurricane or just the alpaca girls taking Jen and Kim’s requests to birth out sooner rather than later to heart, the remaining females went on what can only be described as a birthing binge. First our former show girl, Flirtatious, delivered a little peanut of a female cria (13.8 lb) last Friday. Then Manapany and Juliet decided on Sunday that it would be cool to birth out their Precocious sons in stereo. Almost literally by the way, they were born 15 minutes apart and the resident midwives ended up having two hair dryers going at once. While the births in quick succession were not a problem in and of themselves, the warm room — which is only 20′ x 20′ inside — was getting kind of cramped with bonding pens. Thankfully Flirty’s little girl was by that time strong enough that she and her momma were able to go and rejoin the general population of the greater maternity group out of which they had all come originally. We weren’t out of the woods yet though.

Monday morning as Jen and I were headed to a meeting out of town, we got a photo message from Kimmy: Orange Blossom had just birthed out another healthy boy of her own, this one probably light brown. That left Flashy, literally surrounded by three pairs of moms and neonates, as the sole remaining due female of 2012. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure. Apparently not wanting to be left behind, Flash decided to deliver her cria that very same afternoon. It was a very nice little fawn girl even, how novel.  Coincidentally, Flashy’s 2 year old daughter, Gabbana, who is the full sibling of this latest baby, had also delivered just about a week prior with a cria of her own, one of several adult mother/daughter pairs to successfully birth out for us this year.

And so we closed the book on birthing for this calendar year. Though it’s always a great time seeing the farm’s breeding decisions come to fruition (or not, hey…it happens), after 5 + months of helping to deliver newborns and tending to the unique issues that come with neonatal care, none of us mind that we’re done with much of that business until next June. In any case with daylight savings having kicked in over the weekend it’s getting dark way too early for my taste all of a sudden, creating a real psychological and seasonal shift. The time of newborn crias has (temporarily) passed, the time of dark beer, warm fires, and trashy novels is upon us…