Promotion to the Stud Barn Part 2: CCNF Invictus
We had some suspicions about this young fellow when he first hit the ground. He just looked other. Admittedly when we bred Invictus’ dam Opal with his sire, Precocious, we were hoping for something a little darker than beige. Though Precocious is a white Futurity Champion he comes from a paternal line (Jeremiah/Jericho) just as renowned for it’s colored genetics as its light ones so crossing him with Opal — who is black and likewise has two of those nifty Futurity trophies of her own — wasn’t really over reaching that much. So while we were perhaps put off a bit by the lack of darker fleece color in their resulting young boy, he also showed that he had it almost imediately.
When generalizing about the alpacas born on this farm we’ve always thought that there are roughly 10% of crias that we know almost instantly are going to be something special, another 10% that really get classified as non-breeders before they’re even dry, and then the remaining 80% are what we’ve come to think of as the great grey middle. Many of the animals in that larger group do indeed “pop” later on and develop into truly spectacular animals, though others just sort of flatline in their development and turn out to be just average quality alpacas. Invictus though staked his membership in that upper 10% very early on (as did his brother Tenacious). He’s a on a very short and special list of males that have been born here. Prior to the birth class of 2010 I could count on one hand the number of males born on this farm in our 14+ years of operation for whom we were already choosing potential fantasy breeding matches within our foundation herd before they even hit one year of age. Archangel, Cameron, Ring of Fire, and SuperNova are/were certainly founding members of that club. That Invictus and his paternal brother are even in that conversation speaks volumes of just how highly we rate them.
So what do we see in Invictus that makes him stand out? Simply put he hits that nexus of fleece density and fineness, carrying his fleece uniformity way down into his lower belly and legs. On top of displaying the fleece characteristics of an elite light colored animal let’s also not forget that he comes from dark colored genetics and that may in the end really be the clincher. Then combine that with his undeniable presence when you walk into the barn or out into his feed group’s paddock on the farm. He is simply one of those alpacas that makes people stand up and notice him. We often ask ourselves when rating potential Herdsires a very simple question: do you look at a given male and say “we’d like to have 10 more of those standing in our pasture?” The answer in this case is unequivocally, yes. Like his brother, we expect to be offering Invictus for outside stud service in the spring and summer of 2012 for an introductory fee of $2000.
