Blue Heron Farm Alpacas

Autumn, 2009 -- not a prime season for birds or alpacas, though there is some good news. The guinea population is now three, and that includes one that I hatched in the incubator. Seven actually hatched, but some drowned in the water dish as soon as I put them in the brooder, so by the time I moved them to the coop, there were five. And three of them had "splayed leg," which means one foot points out or backward instead of forward. On to the internet! The cure for this condition is to make a "hobble" out of half a pipe-cleaner and attach the two legs together, straightening out the wayward one. Great in theory, in practice, not so much.  Meaning it didn't work. Early September, I was away for a week (attending my son's graduation with a master's in architecture in LA), and when I returned there were three keets -- two had died for whatever reason -- two sound and one with bad splay. At eight weeks, I released the sound ones to join the existing flock of two adults (in reality, their parents); the next morning there were only three total. One of the young ones did not reappear. A few mornings later, the crippled one -- still in the coop -- was dead of apparently natural causes. (Better than being coyote- or hawk- chow, I guess, which I suspect was the fate of the nesting female and her mate -- seen in the photo with their soon-to-be-gone keets in a previous post.)

And so, on to the alpaca saga. Gazelle gave birth on October 9 -- I was with Jeff, the horse trainer (who is, incidentally, turning Bear into an exemplary ground and riding horse), and I didn't even notice the baby until after Jeff's lesson. Gazelle had no trouble delivering this time, but the baby wasn't standing when I discovered him -- probably two hours old. (He should have been standing, even nursing, by then.)

Here he is with his uncle Edmund -- Mama and sister are just out the door.

By mid-afternoon, he still was not nursing, which becomes an emergency situation because in the first 24 hours, he has to get colostrum to establish his immune system. So I called in the troops -- Alan Rosenbloom -- who arrived with powdered colostrum and an array of equipment. By 6 p.m., we'd gotten eight ounces in him, and Alan planned to return at 11 for another dose. The baby was so weak and floppy, however, that I put in an emergency call to the vet, who came and looked him over, took his temperature (normal), and told me to bottle feed him two ounces of Gatorade (to keep his blood sugar up) every two hours over night. He said that if he survived the night and bonded with his mother eventually and established nursing, he should be all right. Another eight ounces of colostrum at 11, then Gatorade at 2 and 4 am, then Alan back for the last dose of colostrum at 6 am. (He was feeding this through a feeding tube, which I wasn't confident I could do.) Then bottle feeding milk every four hours from 7 am to 10 pm. Fortunately, by Tuesday he was nursing, and he gained weight nicely all along. But he wasn't perky, he wasn't active, he continued to lie around a lot of the time, sometimes on his side, like this:

And when I went out to the barn on Friday morning, he was dead. I took him to the vet school in Raleigh for a necropsy, and if I understand the report correctly, he died of a massive systemic infection, which began in his liver. I assume he was born with the beginning of the infection, and it just spread like wildfire in the course of his one-week life. It was very sad. I have not re-bred Gazelle; I may do so in the spring -- we'll see.

On to the chickens! Chickens? Yes, chickens. My neighbor Garland asked me to incubate some eggs for him, and out of two dozen, 14 hatched. In the brooder, I lost a few to drowning and being piled-upon by the others, but I wound up with nine strong, peeping chicks. Garland suggested I keep some of them, which meant I had to build a chicken coop (the guinea coop isn't really suitable). And so I did -- from plans I got on the internet and my own improvisations. It took me two weeks to get it to the point where I could put the chicks in it (until then they were in my guest room -- chickens are not meant to be in the house, I discovered).

Notice the guinea hanging around the outside of the run. All three guineas seem mesmerized by the chicks and spend a lot of time circling the coop (which is not yet completely stained). They also stick together, for which I am grateful -- safety in numbers, though the numbers are awfully low. Do the two adults know that the young one is their offspring? Can't say, but they do seem solicitous.

And that's the fall so far. More soon.