Moving ...............

With the advent of facebook and now my web page, I am posting most things on either of those pages.

So...........
check out my facebook page
or
nebodama.webs.com

It's over a year

since I wrote anything here. Lots of things have happened. I'm now working three days a week at my paid job and about one day a week volunteering. The alpacas are still on the ranch, but the goat has gone to live in Mt Larcom Qld. We've sold many alpacas including Xali (Jemima - she was nicknamed this by the construction guys working on the road who fell in love with her) and Xena, Xhu Xhu......... Cha Cha has gone to live with someone else, along with Xeus. Zadoc and Zhenka are hopefully guarding goats to the best of their ability. We've had a few babies, and nearly lost Kimberley to worms. She got incredibly sick, and only just hung on. She couldn't stand up, or even get into a cush position from lying she was so weak. I'd decided that if she died I was going to kill her, so kept pumping her full of vitamins, iron, wormer, even made her drink water........ and after about 4 weeks realised that she was going to live. She was really sick for at least three of those weeks when it was touch and go. We'd be getting up during the night to stand her up, and make sure she wasn't lying down on her side. I'd come home from work to discover her flat in the paddock, and it would only be an ear twitch that made me realise she was still alive. I'd load her onto a trolley and drag her up from the bottom of the paddock to water and food and the obligatory injections. She's back to her fine self again, but still thin.

We lost a baby......... Elouise's Wheyo. He was about 15 months old. The vet did an autopsy and said Endotoxemia. It didn't make it any easier to digest cause there was no reason for it. He had been healthy and seemed to be in good condition, and was fine the day before he died.
Really hard. Her next baby was Vanco Victory who was stuck during birth, and was hanging with head and legs out for more than 4 hours while I was at work. I came home and pulled him out, and then had to feed him for about three weeks because he seemed to have difficulty raising his head, and feeding from Elouise. However, persistence paid off, and he's fine now. He was born at the end of May 2008.

Craftwork has kept me busy with lots of felting and now lots and lots of orders for spun yarn.
Not enough hours in the day to do it all (as well as work)

which reminds me............. I should be carding wool right now.

Will post some pictures

Why didn't you stay just a little bit longer?

Life just isn't fair. It's fucking awful, and I have no apologies to anyone reading this. It's just fucking awful.

Yesterday Xebebe died. She was 12 months old. We don't know why she died. She is buried in the bottom paddock. I buried her this morning. Put her in a calico body bag I made , and wheeled her down there in the wheel barrow. Goodbye Xebebe........ you were so beautiful.

I never dreamed that I could lose an animal like that when I reckon I've done everything to protect them. The vet thinks it could have been peritonitis .....if she had eaten a bit of wire ????? Who knows. It didn't didn't appear to be snake bite, a tick, anything preventable. She had a fever - just skyrocketed. She had a sore foot but that made no sense, because .......... well it just didn't - no cuts, no swelling, no breaks, no dislocations. She'd put her weight on it, but then didn't want to walk.

I cry. I feel sorry for myself. I feel sad for her and her lost life. I just want to curl up and sob.

The good, the bad, and the worse.

OK..... time to catch up. XhuXhu was born before Christmas. She is a bouncing baby, and sister to Yadra who died early in 2006. Xhu Xhu may have been a tiny bit premature, but is full of life, brown all over, and looks very much like Xeus. They will be very hard to tell apart in the future.

2007 Australia Day. Bad Day. Horrible day really. In the morning we had to call the vet out to help deliver a cria for Dew Drop. For some reason, the baby had died in utero a day or so previously, and just hadn't engaged into the birthing position. The vet had to rotate the cria, and then deliver it. It was a good sized white boy which we named Walla.

Later that afternoon my little friend Penny started to have her baby. She delivered Wink at about 2.30pm. Wink was tiny at 4kgs, and quite weak. The next day I decided to take him for a plasma transfusion, as he was still terribly weak, and wasn't feeding from Penny. That gave him a boost, but he was still worrying me, so I took him back, and the vet at Samford detected a heart murmur.... patent ductus arteriosus. Well, after quite intensive treatment including another plasma transfusion, being in an oxygen tent for 24+ hours, broncho dilators, antibiotics, and............ Poor little Wink died. We were all upset, because he was a such a gorgeous baby. Penny was being a wonderful mother too, and was really co-operative while I expressed her milk for Wink.

So..... I'm feeling incredibly sad that I have lost so many babies. There is no common factor..... different mothers, different fathers, different times of the year, different causes. I worry that I have a long way to go before I can write the A-Z of birthing problems in alpacas, as I've only got to about 8.

Xeus

This is Xeus. Born on 30th November. Mother is Kimberley... you can just see her dark head with gray markings on her cheek. He is about 3 hours old in the photo, and had not been any problem from the start. Lordy is the dad. Xeus is very lively, and races around the paddock with the other littlies. Xali is very taken with him. His fleece has much more crimp than Xyllan who is the caramel coloured baby behind him.

Felting

Ah......... felt that.
Not a particularly good picture of a cushion that I made. It's made with the background of felted alpaca (black) and has a picture of tree, clouds, and "paddock" in the foreground. I'm rather proud of it. Over the past few months I've been doing lots of felting. Felted soap on a rope, biros, bookmarks, bags, hats, leaves, and most recently rolled roses. I've found that alpaca felts just as well, (actually -better and quicker than wool slivers) as long as guard hair and coarser hair is removed when I'm drum carding it. The batts off the drum carder are ideal to lay down "just like that" and makes laying out the felt incredibly fast. I try not to make the batts too thick. Making felt has been an ideal way of using up my huge stache of wool from the shed.

The Wedding............ Celeste and John on 12 October 2006, at Daydream Island.











Chook with a cross "bite" . I've thought about taking her to work and adjusting the bite but she seems fine, and eats well, and is laying.......... I think. The chook establishment has recently grown. I was given 2 bantam chicks. One managed to get out of the cage after Scruffy strategically removed some of the gutter guard, and Poor Chickie jumped into the jaws of one of the dogs. Both Scruffy and Max were severely roused at. They didn't eat the chicken, just mouthed it, to prevent it escaping, and it died. I decided that the other would be lonely, so I purchased three more chicks, which are much younger but much larger than the original chick. All doing well, and dogs have the threat of death if they go anywhere near the chicken cage. Still on the "bird" note....... a few weeks ago, after a storm, a pink and grey galah stood at the gate wanting me to have a look at it. The dogs and cat did too, so they were all banished to the shed, while I picked up the bird. It was really bedraggled, and I wasn't sure if it was really young or really old because it really looked bad. The budgie cage came into play again, and in went the galah. what was noticable about it was that it had a really severe beak problem, with the lower beak projecting nearly an inch past the upper one. Not lateral like the chook above, but in line. I organised to take it to the Vet to have a beak reduction, but put it in a larger cage because it was having trouble scooping food up from the floor of the budgie cage. The rotten thing found a hole in the cage and escaped before I could get it to the vet. I haven't seen it again, but hope that it is managing ................







NOSE WARMERS.......... what everyone should have in winter. Felted from alpaca and embroidered. They fit the average nose. (and smell nice)

Catching up...............Xali and Xyllan

XALI - a lovely story. Little Xali was born 3 weeks ago. She was the first live birth for her mummy, Miss Tunisia (aka Missy) Xali was 5.2 kg at birth, which is relatively small. The problem was that Missy didn't want Xali to feed from her. They bonded well, but as soon as Xali wanted to feed, her mother spat at her, and pushed her away. I gave Xali Impact Colostrum for the first 12 hours and some glucose, and then started feeding her Di-Vetalact (which is a milk substitute). Missy continued to spit at Xali for the next 2 days whenever she tried to feed. When she was 2 days old, I noticed that Xali's left eye was starting to weep and in my words, was a bit "goopy". I was devastated, and phoned up the alpaca gurus in a panic. To cut a long story short, and not mentioning all the tears I shed in the next few hours, Xali was rushed to one of the vets and had a camelid plasma transfusion. The eye had a small ulcer in it, (irritation , I think from the spit from her mother) and so for the next week I had to give her antibiotics, and eye drops, and eye cream, and treat her as an orphan. By Day 4 Missy had decided that this gorgeous baby could touch her titties, and so Xali started trying to feed from her mother. I kept "force feeding " her, and kept weighing her to ensure she was putting on weight. In the past few days, I've decided that she's getting enough milk from her mummy, and have stopped feeding her. The weigh-ins continue. She is the most gorgeous baby, and races round the paddock like there is no tomorrow..... which I hope there are plenty of. She also has an umbelical hernia, but I've decided that this is the least of her problems for the moment.
XYLLAN - This is Xyllan and Jessie, his mother, when he was 2 hours old. Another lovely story. Jessie's first baby was still born 18 months ago. (Yasmin) There was much confusion about when Jessie was due, and indeed if she was pregnant. We had expected a cria in early May this year, but it didn't arrive. This truly has to be an immaculate conception, because the Stud Male has not been in the "girls paddock" for well over a year. Anyway....... something happened, and nobody's telling me! and then one day when I was stressing that she must have had some terrible gynecological condition, I felt what I thought was a cria in-utero. (no ultrasounds available here............) Xyllan was born 1 week after Xali, and was a large boy. Very large shoulders, and so I gave Jessie a hand birthing him. She is the most gorgeous loving mother, and Xyllan too is weighed every second day, but is putting on heaps of weight, and is no cause for concern.

Xip Xip -

This lovely little boy was born on saturday 15 July. He was lively and seemed great. However, within 3 days he'd become septic, and he died. I'd taken him to the local vet that morning thinking that he was just a bit slower, and they said that he was fine.... heart rate and beat good, temperature good - no obvious signs of problems. I decided to take him to the alpaca guru vet who is about an hour's drive away. They did blood tests and found that he was very septic, his liver was shutting down, and he was very sick. He died (probably of meningitis) that afternoon after plasma transfer, antibiotics, and other treatment. It was the last thing I expected when I picked him up in the morning. It was incredibly sad.
He was the only alpaca we had with a white face.