Sometimes we never seem to learn but we’ll keep trying!

We just finished December herd health the other day, which was no no great shakes given that it was a non-toenail month. All told it probably took maybe 4 hours? I was honestly only involved at the Arena, Jen and Kimberly having whipped out the Main Barn and the Stud Barn on their own, and the only reason it took as long as it did is that we were giving our youngsters there their biweekly dose of ADE paste at the same time while also tending to the odd set of chapped lips as we went along.

It’s always a little frustrating to find skinny dams and crias this time of year. You would think that after 14+ years of doing this gig we might have the nutritional management thing down pat! While for the most part I suppose we do, there does always seem to be one or two females that slip through the cracks when that first dose of sustained cold weather starts to be a factor. The slightly odd part this time around was that the females in question came out of the late fall maternity group where the crias are all 1 to 2 months of age now, whereas we would normally expect to see those extreme body condition swings in moms with older crias (who are sucking off more calories). It may be that the relatively mild weather we experienced here throughout much of November gave us a false sense of security and that as a result we didn’t view any of the thinner girls in that feed group last month with the same urgency? As with many things in alpaca husbandry: live and learn. For now at least the critters in that feed group are being offered free-choice grain (they had been getting a ration of roughly 2.5 cups) as we make an effort to pack some weight back onto them before the real cold starts!