CCNF Angiolo officially becomes a working Herdsire!
We are excited to announce that we have yet another newly operational Herdsire in our breeding program: CCNF Angiolo! As the person who manages 90%+ of the breeding activity here at our farm, I have seen quite a lot of variation over the years when it comes to the breeding behaviors of alpaca males. Some are naturals (good libidos with excellent mechanics and balance) almost from the first time we ask them to work, while others seem to breed with a coordination more akin to a slinky haphazardly making its way down an industrial staircase which, for better or for worse, is really what gives yours truly my job security. Most of those less coordinated males do eventually grow out of their rookie spazziness — practice makes perfect and all of that — but for others, that’s kind of just the way they’re wired and we are able to help them work through that as needed. The simple fact is that May through October I spend quality each day making sure that parts of our males’ anatomy go and then stay where they are supposed to. It ain’t always pretty.
For those not familiar with this aspect of alpaca husbandry, it’s fairly common for male alpacas to begin breeding around the the age of 2. Almost every year we have a group of young males coming of age that we are hoping to use in our program but that need to learn the ropes, all while navigating the potential pitfalls of interacting with the females on our our farm, without whose consent there would be no dance and no crias to follow. This year’s rookie Herdsire class has been a real pleasure to work with though: first Bataclan (CCNF Elixir x CCNF Daliance), who actually a achieved a confirmed pregnancy after his very first breeding and now his cousin, Angiolo…
In Angiolo’s case, we had started him breeding with the rest of our working Herdsires back in mid-June and he was in fact such a natural, that it was several days into the melee that is our maiden/open female breeding group — 30+ females in various states of mind from “why haven’t you bred me yet?” to “don’t you dare come anywhere near me!” — before I happened to look up his birth date and realized that he wouldn’t even be 2 years of age until October 9 of this year! It had all been almost too easy quite frankly and in my excitement I had messaged his co-owners, the Glasscock family at Legendary Alpacas of Texas, to report that Angiolo had mounted, gotten a female to cush, and then bred routinely his very first time with such poise that it never even occurred to me that he was so relatively young. It was their response and happy surprise that actually made me look up his BoD on my phone. For some perspective, over the years we’ve had at least two of our other working boys not achieve their first confirmed pregnancies until a whole lot closer to their 3rd birthdays than their 2nd, so the fact that Angiolo achieved his first pregnancy at just 20 months of age is genuinely remarkable. The potential for our special boy is pretty exciting given what other similar males in our program have already accomplished, most notably his paternal brother, Centurion. The beige son of Snowmass Matrix Majesty and CCNF Bellisima, who is an Archangel/SuperNova/Pachelbel cross, we can’t wait to see what Angiolo can do both here and with our partners out in Texas where he will arrive this fall to work in a herd to which he is mostly unrelated. Should be fun!
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