Labor day(s)

CCNF Panamera's new Sub-Zero son strikes a pose earlier today. He and his penmates are getting cria shorn as this is written...
CCNF Panamera’s Sub-Zero son strikes a pose earlier today. He and his penmates are getting cria shorn as this is written…

Holy baby boom Batman! Jen started the tradition several years back of taking the farm’s staff out to the local Chinese buffet for lunch any time that we have had 3 or more crias born in a given 24 hour period. The reality of late though, is that we had that happen days ago and frankly there just hasn’t been a chance to get everyone off of the farm yet, not together anyway. Yes, I suppose there is of course a moral/ethical debate to be had about subjecting the GI tracts of one’s employees to a Chinese buffet from Claremont, NH though that is of course another whole subject. I digress, as usual. The fact is, we just haven’t dared to leave the farm all together, as every time we turned around over the past week, another one of our due females seemed to have a nose and two front legs sticking out of their business end. For the record, I believe the current birthing run amounted to 13 crias born in 7 days. Not a a bad clip at all.

Wanted to condense your birthing season did you Lutzes? Mother Nature always has the last laugh where those sorts of things are concerned. I’ll freely admit that there were a couple of times over the past week where we weren’t feeling so smart, though on the plus side we can now genuinely visualize the end of the birthing season. The final group of expectant females are all in the Arena now with most of them — minus a couple of laggards who aren’t due until mid October — penned together in the on-deck circle. With just a bit of good timing, we might even head up to the Green Mountain show the weekend of October 18th with all of the 2014 birth class on the ground. Crazy talk, I know, especially given that last year we were on maternity watch off and on until Christmas morning. Maybe you can teach old dogs new tricks though?

In the mean time, the CCNF Arena and it’s pens and outside paddocks have taken on a decidedly more playful tone, with 50+ of those little knee-biters — in some cases literal knee-biters — romping around. There are few things as joyful on an alpaca farm as watching a clutch of crias, sometimes an entire feed group’s worth of 14 even, sprint up and down a hillside together either oblivious or reveling (or parts of each) in their dams’ occasional annoyance at being run into by a pack of adorable but marauding 20 to 30 pounders. So while things have felt a bit manic for the past 10 days or so, it’s actually been a nice transition back into school life for our kids, the month of September, and the promise of the cooler months ahead. Onward and upward we go…

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