Shearing Day, rain and sunshine

After listening to the weather forecast last night we left the alpacas out last night as it was going to dry up and be sunny today. Not sure why I believed that as they said it would be dry yesterday afternoon when we had a llama walk and it rain all the time, cream tea in the rain sheltering under one of the Tors is an experience to say the least. the customers all thought it was fun though which is the main thing.

Any way I woke this morning to sunshine so pleased I made a cup of tea and went back to bed for a good read for about half an hour. By now it is pouring with rain, not much we could do now but hope that it didn't last long. Rain stopped and the breeze was blowing, the alpacas looked dry and fluffy and Colin rang to say he was running late due to the weather so plenty of time for them to be completely dry. Steve topped one of the fields while we waited, can't believe we are cutting grass like this, while our top paddocks aren't growing at all.

We had a lovely picnic lunch in the fields, the sun still shining, Colin arrived with Gaia in tow and set to work, they make the whole process look so easy and the job was soon done. I took the opportunity to give the Blue Tongue injections while they were restrained much easier than holding them.

We had a visit from Lucy who works at Paignton Zoo looking after the large cats and rhino, she was after some fleece to use with the lions and tigers, apparently they like to play with the fleece, it's the different smells they are most interested in, so Lucy left with several bags of leg and neck fleece and left us with a bag containing several bottles of wine. Not a bad exchange me thinks! There ought to be a competition for the strangest use for fibre

So we now have fields of lovely looking Alpacas I especially like the dark colours when they are shorn they look so elegant.

Our pregnant females are now coming upto their due dates and now they are without their fleece we can clearly see the crias moving around. The first one due is Carla she is just 10.5 months ironically she is the only one we didn't shear as she is an older girl and she did suffer a bit this winter, we put a coat on her for several weeks, she had not grown much fleece so we decided to leave her this year.

We are of to collect our pigs tomorrow and hopefully I can upload some pictures.