It took me a long time to decide on a name for our cria but I've finally decided on Nina. A good Spanish name that I think suits her. Here she is with her mom Ivy.
This is how Nina spends most of her time each day. Ivy is a great mom and stands for long periods of time to let her baby nurse. We're not used to this as the lambs are so aggressive when nursing. They kneel down and slam their mouths onto their moms udders, sometimes lifting moms back end off the ground slightly, suckle for a few seconds and it's over. The alpacas nursing sessions are so relaxed and nurturing by comparison. Nina will spend up to 5 minutes under there sometimes!
Here's Esther. A lot has been written about her here already but to summarize Esther, she's a: carrot and apple loving, affectionate yet temperamental, brave but timid guard llama. She's great at her job, despite some new competition from Domini.
Here's a few of the girls all in a row. I tried to take individual pictures of everyone today but it's in their nature to stick close together when feeling threatened, even by me. From the left there's Mirabelle, Hazel or Henny (I STILL can't tell them apart), Izzy, Freckles and Ippi. Mirabelle is the ovine matriarch around here. She's mom to Freckles, Hazel and Henny. We're quite happy with our little flock now and it's fun to have all the ewes very closely related. We'll bring in an unrelated Ram each year to service the ewes and with only four of them the genetics are quite easy to work out.
Ippi and Izzy are great lambs. It's hardly fair to write too affectionately about animals that will go to slaughter in a few short months, but it's our philosophy that in order to really live a good life here a name and a relationship with the animal helps. Ippi is a lot of fun and he's developing a common tendency of rams that is to be very friendly with humans. When we book an appointment for him at the local abattoir I'll be sure to get his fleece back as the black and white will make a nice sheepskin. Ippi's sister, Izzy, is a lovely little sheep. She's still very timid but cute as anything. I took her to the vet a couple months ago as she had a lame foot. Turned out to be just a sprained ankle (or equivalent thereof) and after some pain medication she stopped limping. Though costly to visit the vet it's worth it as Izzy runs around now as if nothing ever happened.
Hazel and Henny, seen below, are never far from each other. In fact, I'd bet they've not been more than 50 feet from one another since birth. They look nearly identical, except that Hazel has a patch of black fleece on the right side of her neck. You can't see it unless you move the fleece around and find it so telling these two apart is very difficult. They're still quite young and neither had a successful birth this Spring. They've grown up a lot this summer though and have matured a bit as they're not as skittish as they used to be. I'm hoping they produce some nice lambs next Spring and I think they'll be much more ready to do so then.
Mirabelle, the matriarch and leader of the flock. She does whatever she wants whenever and those who want to follow can...and usually do. A couple weeks ago she reasserted her role as leader by bringing Freckles down a few notches. I don't know how it came about but these two butted heads with one another for hours one day and eventually it was obvious that Freckles had lost.
Mirabelle has the loudest Bah of the lot and when I feed the chickens each morning before work I try to do so without being seen by her. If she knows I'm around she bah's to "ask" for grain and I fear that all the neighbours will be awoken.
Domini is an interesting girl. She's nice enough but has an edge to her and we've not yet established a good relationship. Interestingly she seems to be fixing to take over as guardian, or at least as an early warning system. She's got a keen, though often misguided, eye/ear and alerts us all to things lurking along the tree line with her high pitched impression of a cartoon squeaky wheel. Always on the lookout, I fear that Dom will greatly reduce my chances of filling my deer tags right off the farm this season.
