craige's blog

Kristina and I are looking at another farm with a view to selling ours and moving to this new one. This particular farm has a rather large cool store on site.

Looking at this rather large, 12Mx12Mx5M, refrigerated shed our reactions were along these lines:

Kristina: "Cool, dairy...."

Craige: "Cool, data centre..."

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince named Hamish. Prince Hamish wanted nothing more than goats milk to fill his rumbling belly.

"Mother dearest," said Hamish, very eloquently for a 3 month old human, "Would you be an absolute darling and fetch me some fresh goats milk?".

Being a loving mother, Hamish's mum left Hamish asleep in his climate controlled, hermetically sealed crib, where the radio is always tuned to Classic FM, much to Daddy's chagrin.

Mummy came across a large white animal whose name was Creampuff. "Are you are goat?" Mummy asked. "No, I'm an Alpaca" replied Creampuff.

Mummy approached a large, light brown animal but before mummy could ask anything she rudely pushed past mummy saying "Get out of my way, I want my food!".

"Goodness me!" said mummy, a little flabergasted, "who was that?". "That was Callisto. My name is Grace Kelly. How are you?". "I'm fine, now" replied mummy. "Are you a goat?". "I'm a Cria, a baby Alpaca" said Grace Kelly.

"We're all Alpacas here" said Penelope.

Then in unison, they said "You could ask over there...".

So mummy wandered in the direction suggested by the Alpacas and she came across two lovely little animals who introduced themselves as Pixie and Lala.

"Are you goats?" asked mummy. The goats replied "Yes!" and jumped around with glee. "Can I milk you?" mummy asked ever so politely.

"Only if I can eat your hair" said Lala. So mummy agreed and the milking began.

"I want you to cut down a willow tree with...a herring!" said Pixie. So mummy sent daddy off and when he returned, again the milking began.

When all the milking was over, mummy had got 100ml from each goat, not bad for their first milking.

"I wonder what goats milk tastes like?" mummy pondered aloud, so she had just a little taste (or two). "Delicious!" was the verdict.

...and young Prince Hamish was very happy indeed.

This morning Penelope gave birth to Grace Kelly. Although the dodgy camera photo does her no justice, Grace Kelly is what they call a light fawn. Not white, not brown, I'm sure you get the idea.

Penelope and Grace Kelly enjoy a balmy spring morning

We were trying to reproduce Penelope's luscious colours but the black male we were trying to mate her with wasn't producing strong swimmers (and he died a few months later). We switched to a light fawn male and the result 12 months later is Grace Kelly.

Welcome Grace Kelly.

We had 50 soft tree ferns to plant this weekend, we got 15 in. Here's a quick pic of the six planted before the gate, in the wildlife corridor.

Hopefully we've pumped them with enough water for them to make it and not dry out and die. All bar one are taller than me and the stringy bark to the left of the photo should keep them nicely shaded :)

While the boys were visiting me last week, I had them put to work of course :)

Ewan helped me with getting the bolts into this old blackboard and the wall studs so we could hang it using heavy duty window sash cord. The photo to the left shows it mounted on the wall and put to "good" use by the kids and Kristina.

Now though, the blackboard is covered with our plans for Alpaca world domination, should we choose to head down that path.

Kristina and I were quite chuffed to welcome Hamish into our lives a couple of weeks ago:

Mother and child are healthy, at home and doing well :)

I'm not going to bore everyone with my disection of the results, you can click here for the ABC's take.

This is just an historic event, the Greens outpolling a major party and winning a lower house seat in the West Australian Parliament. Are we on the cusp of breaking the Liberal/Labor duoply of the tweedle-dee tweedle-dum version of democracy and see some energy, vigour and accountability injected into Australian politics?

One can only hope so :)

As twilight merged into the darkness of the night sky, there was a little excitement in one of our paddocks last night. Attempting to get one of our Alpacas, Creampuff, to join the others for feeding I discovered that she had given birth to her cria. In the excitement and the looming darkness, I called Kristina over and attempted to have the little one follow us and Creampuff up to the shelter for feeding. We had completed that shelter on Sunday evening in expectation of this cria's birth.

We were fairly excited. Our first Alpaca baby had arrived. The cria's breathing was a little rattly and raspy to my ears but I didn't think too much of it. When Kristina arrived the wobbly little cria made some almost excited steps towards her and nuzzled Kristina's legs.

Noting that the breathing was more laboured and forced than raspy and rattly, Kristina knelt down to have a closer look at our new pride and joy as well as to examine the breathing. In the darkness, Kristina found that something was definitely wrong with the cria's face and went to fetch a torch.

I don't think Kristina was prepared for the shock of what she found. Neither of us were.

When the torch light fell upon the cria's face you could see it was severely twisted, a congenital condition we soon learnt was called "wry face". I'm not going to be posting any photos here but I will say that an animal with it's nasal passage where it's right cheek should be is an unsettling sight.

A twist of > 60° is considered severe. This poor little cria had a twist between 80-90°.

We made some calls to our breeder for some advice and diagnosis. We knew that breathing through the nasal passage was impossible, which meant suckling was not going to happen. Kristina checked the mother's udders and her milk had not arrived. Alpacas deliver milk once suckling has commenced, the absence of milk meant that the cria had not been suckling.

By now the cria was between 4 and 6 hours old, it hadn't eaten, it hadn't suckled. It could in fact do neither and walking was becoming increasingly difficult as the minutes passed. We put a coat on the cria and placed it in the shelter as the cold of a crisp May night closed in.

We watched the cria's condition deteriorite for another couple of hours. There was no suckling despite the attentiveness of it's mother, Creampuff. We were unable to help it suckle, eat or drink.

After much discussion, consultation and expert advice we came to the conclusion that this cria was faced with a long, cold, torturous night as it slowly starved to death unless we intervened.

With suckling and eating not being a possibility for this cria, we summoned our neighbour and his rifle to make the trauma of the night as short as possible for it.

Alapca parents are known to fret and pine for weeks if their cria "disappear". In consideration of this we returned the body of the beautiful, sweet, cria to it's mother so that nature could take it's course and her grief would be as short as possible.

Creampuff has spent all of today and into this evening watching over her little cria, clicking, cooing and guarding.

Once Creampuff has grieved and abandoned the body of her cria, we're going to bury it in the wildlife corridor and plant a tree over it's grave to remember the beautiful little cria and it's brief life as the first alpaca born at our place.

Our beloved national treasurer, Wayne Swan, was bleating to the media yet again about how our latest demons, CEOs - who appear to have supplanted terrorists, should be cutting their salaries to share the pain with "average Australians".

I couldn't agree more that executive salaries ought to be cut, particularly as their salaries are great examples of the wanton greed that has lead to this current financial crisis. I have a real problem though, with people like our treasurer or any politician for that matter, calling for others to take action while they do nothing.

Wayne Swan calling for executives to cut their salaries is just a cheap political stunt on Swan's behalf until he and the Labor Party show some real leadership and cut parliamentary salaries. Imagine politicians leading by example, it's almost getting what we vote for.

The ineffectual management of this nation by both the Liberal and Labor parties is abhorrent. Their parliamentary salaries should be reduced dramatically and become a performance based arrangement.

You look after your electorate and state/nation by meeting set performance expectations and we'll give you free-loaders extra pay. Provide some leadership parliamentarians, it's theoretically why you're there. It would be great to see it in practice.

Until politicians cut their salaries and introduce performance based pay scales, telling others to cut their salaries  just smacks you in the face as the most blatent "pot, meet kettle" political gamesmanship that treats the Australian people as though we're simpletons.

We don't want words, we want leadership and action.

As Easter is all about spring and it's burst of life in the Northern Hemisphere (ignoring the wee superstitious folk who adopted it for their imaginary friend), it's all about the burst of life here at the moment too.

We've had our three alpacas arrive today, after 12 months agistment at Inapari Alpacas.

Our ladies are all pregnant now too, taking the tally of pregnant ladies on our farm to four - three alpacas and one human :) All four are due between May and September, which will make for a busy winter. I think the spacing ought to be sane though.

There was a weird stand-off moment as the sheep and goats all sized up the new arrivals, eerily reminded me of a scene from "Babe" ( I could almost hear Magda's voice...).

We're also yet to determine a naming theme for our alpaca cria, if you have any suggestions please drop a comment :)

Anyway, here are some happy snaps:

Creampuff

Callisto

Penelope