Getting our Bells rung
Sorry not to have posted as much lately. The truth is I didn’t expect that any of you would find stories of commutes to and from school/soccer practice/games mixed in with exciting tales of rain falling on an alpaca farm all that exciting. New England as a whole (yours truly included) has also spent the last several days getting over the monumental collapse of our local baseball team. No offense Yankees fans but at least this way we don’t have to go through the rather awkward exercise of thanking your organization for getting ours into the postseason. That would have been a bit much. Either way it was going to be ugly I suspect: perhaps this ultimately quick (after the slow death march of September, one of the chokiest chokes of all time) rip of the band-aid was better in the end? Ouch either way though.
Back to things alpaca and after almost three weeks without any action in the maternity ward here on the farm — a truly rare occurrence this time of year — Bellafina finally had her 2011 cria this morning around 7 AM. That brings the total remaining due females down to 12. For her part this is the only live cria (it was of course a male, BTW) that we now have from our former white color Champion: her first kid, Expialidocious, died last year as a yearling in a freak fencing accident and her cria from last year didn’t make it past 48 hours after succumbing to an e-coli infection. That little ingrate of course dried off just long enough to show us that he was unquestionably the most impressive Precocious cria born in 2011. In spite of today’s nice little guy being sired by the one and only Elite Legend, with EL cooling his heels in Idaho for the next 10 months or so it’s not hard to guess who Bellafina will be going back to this time around!
Bellafina (paternally an Archangel kid) is one of four remaining female members of a highly valued maternal line: two daughters, one granddaughter, and one great granddaughter of the legendary Accoyo dam, PPPeruvian Pachelbel, whom we were lucky enough to have in our foundation herd during the last half of her life. Bellafina and her maternal sister, Bellarina (a SuperNova kid paternally), her daughter Bellisima (back to Archangel on that one), and last but certainly not least, Pacabel’s great grandaughter, Bellanova (another Legacy Gold line/SuperNova girl), rounds out the crew. As an aside, Bellanova also shares the same maternal granddam, Snowmass Bell (whom we had sold to our friends the Youngs some years ago), as King of the Ladies. If nothing else I guess we’ve established that the Bells cross well with Archangel, huh?
Though Bellisima has still not had her 2011 cria, we did feel strongly enough about her Precocious kid last year — Bellagio, making his show debut in 12 days time — to repeat that breeding. Every now and then we do actually do something right in spite of ourselves. With Bellafina’s youngster born today it does mean that we are 3 for 4 though, 2 boys (ahem) and one girl. While it’s obviously too early to rate the latest member of the clan the others, and particularly Bellanova’s Elite Legend son, have gotten our attention early. Time and development will of course separate the players from the pretenders. In the mean time we just keep trying to find what works and repeat it as best we can.
