Llama Biography #21: Autumn Hill's Inali

I have to admit it, Inali was one of my favorite llamas.  If only he had been a girl I would've been set for life!

Fuzzy boy!

When we got our new herdsire, Randallama's Cherokee, in 2004, we bred him to a bunch of our females that fall.  Alder Crest April Showers was one of those females.  April is pretty much my favorite llama, so I was excited to have another baby from her.

April, Inali's dam.

Cherokee, Inali's sire.

When the fall of 2005 came around, we had two Cherokee crias (Trillium and Catastrophie) born in late September.  Just three days after Catastrophie was born, I came home to find a baby running around with April.  As I was walking from the house out to the barn I kept hoping that it was a girl, but of course it turned out to be a boy!  But he was adorable!  April has a good track record of throwing babies with big bone and heavy fiber, and Inali got all of it!  He is built just like her.

Just a few hours old.

Mom and baby.

Fuzzy boy growing up!

Such a ham!

Trillium sold right after her first show in 2006, so Inali became my show boy for the year.  He didn't do great in halter because he was pretty small (although he did get a few 3rd places in large classes at the Indy Open and Llama Showcase), but by the time the 4-H fair came around he was doing great in performance!  We won Grand Champion Senior Performance, Grand Champion Showmanship, and Grand Champion Costume at the Shelby County Fair.  Unfortunately our show season was cut short, as Inali sold at the Llama Showcase show and went to his new home in northern Indiana shortly after the 4-H fair.

Shortly after being shorn.

Inali has a wonderful home where he is loved and spoiled.  He actually lives with a bunch of horses.  I went back a year after I sold him to shear him, and it was scary how much he looked like his mom!

Inali (now affectionally called Chewy) with his horse buddy.

Temptation

I've been good this week, but I've wanted to be so bad!  This week has been full of temptation...

First I saw an ad for 3 free female alpacas in a nearby town (I actually know the farm).  A few days later I found another ad for free pet/fiber quality male alpacas (I know this farm too).  I would love to have more alpacas...  As much as I prefer llamas to alpacas, alpacas produce so much more fiber (at least on average).  I do eventually plan to get 2-3 more alpacas to raise for fiber, but I managed to talk myself out of considering adding more right now.

My first 3 fiber alpacas.  Unfortunately the two white ones were fairly brainless so they were sold after a couple of years.

The third temptation was the LFA sale this past weekend.  For the first time in years, I really wasn't super interested in any of the llamas in the regular sale, but there was a male in the claims futurity that I would have loved to bring home!  He is a gorgeous paint, half Argentine, with multiple halter and fleece winnings.  Just what I'm looking for!  Again, lucky for me I have ABSOLUTELY no business buying a breeding male right now.  I just don't have room.

These temptations, especially the LFA sale (and also seeing tons of pictures from the ILR Gathering show the same weekend), have really given me the bug to start a breeding herd again.  I want nothing more than to be able to get back into breeding and selling (and showing!) llamas!

My goal for my breeding herd in the past was always to breed the all-around llama...personality (and training), conformation, and fiber.  Not to toot my own horn, but I think I've done pretty well.  (I guess this is a good time to mention that Kara (Autumn Hill's Karakoram) was entered in her first 2 shorn fleece classes in the past 2 weeks, and she won a Grand Champion Double Coat (The Fiber Frenzy) and a Reserve Grand Champion Double Coat (ILR Gathering)!!  So proud of my girl, and my breeding program!)

Kara's fleece from last year, right before shearing.

When I start a breeding herd again, that is still going to be my focus.  I don't expect to have performance champions (though I have raised one!), but I want my babies to have a handleable personality, so with extensive training they could be!  I'd love to have halter champions (and have raised several who have gotten champions in halter, one even got enough to be an ALSA Halter Champion!).  And of course I want fine, single coat fleece, but this one I'm going to step up a notch.  I'm sick of having beautiful fleeces, but only getting 1 pound of prime fleece per animal!  As a fiber farm, animals need to produce more fleece to make it profitable.  I also happen to love thick bone structure in a llama, so my plan is to introduce some Argentine bloodlines into my herd in the future.  Argentines have extremely dense fiber, capable of producing 5+ pounds of prime fleece (and often are single coat).  Adding thick bones would just be a plus!

The pride and joy of my breeding program, Autumn Hill's Khatadyn.  He finished his ALSA Halter Champion!

Autumn Hill's Charity, multiple fleece and youth performance champion.

Autumn Hill's Rainier, winner of multiple fiber and halter champions and some great performance placings too!  He's also Kara's full brother.

I really can't afford to get several full Argentine llamas (even in the future), so my plan is to get an Argentine male and a couple heavy wool North American females (and maybe even a heavy wool NA male too).  I've heard that Argentines can increase fiber on their crias in just one generation (even 25% Argentine llamas can have thicker fiber), so I think that might be the way to start and make it more reasonable.

I fully intend on Kara being one of my cornerstone females in a future breeding program.  She has interesting bloodlines, and represents 2 of my favorite llamas from my past breeding program.  She hasn't been in the halter ring in almost 2 years (!), but she did very well at her first 2 shows as a juvenile.  I'm really hoping she will impress the judges when she gets back in the ring this fall.  And of course her recent fleece placings are very encouraging.

A terrible picture of Kara.

I also have high hopes for another representative of my former breeding program, and it hasn't even been conceived yet!  I'm not sure I've announced this here yet, but I'm getting a baby llama in 1.5-2 years!  I've regretted selling May (Little May Flowers) since the day she left our farm almost 8 years ago, and I finally decided to do something about it.  I'm going to "rent" May for the next year...any day now she will be bred to a gorgeous ALSA Halter Champion male, and hopefully have a fabulous baby in about a year.  Once the baby is weaned, I will bring him/her out to my farm in NY.  I'm really excited to have a relative of April (Alder Crest April Showers) in my breeding herd again, and I think the dad will add some great traits to the cria (one of his crias was an ALSA National Champion in halter).  Needless to say I hope the baby is a girl, but a male would actually be okay since it will be completely unrelated to Kara.

May definitely has a lot of great traits to pass on to a cria.

Who wouldn't want a cria related to this beautiful girl (April)??

Autumn Hill's Blazing Starr, May's first cria and one of my best production to date.

Unfortunately, even though I have all this completely planned out (I even know what farms I'm going to "shop" at!), I don't think it will be happening any time soon.  My barn is just not set up for a larger herd, so it all will have to wait until we either move or build a new barn.  I'm definitely itching to get started though!

Definitely my best group of crias ever!

Shearing is DONE!!

Finally, after 2 long weeks, shearing is done for the year!  I have a love-hate relationship with shearing...I hate doing all the grooming and I'm terrible at shearing, but I love having fresh fiber and I love how the animals look shorn!

First up was Ralph.  I'm not brave enough to shear him on my own (and my shears are definitely not up to the challenge), so I got a recommendation for a local shearer and called them up.  I didn't want to pay a set-up fee for just Ralph, so I took him down to their farm while they were shearing their own animals.  It has been several years since Ralph was shorn while stretched on the ground (he's been shorn standing at a llama show we used to go to), and he was NOT happy!  Luckily he didn't pee himself this time though!

And now I have 1 handsome burr-less alpaca, and 2 gorgeous bags of fiber!  The best fiber is at the mill, ready to be processed into roving.  The leg and neck fiber will go to another mill in a few weeks, to get made into more insoles.

Ralph's fiber will get processed the same as last summer...it will look like this!  70% alpaca, 20% merino, 10% firestar.

Next up, and first for me, was April.  April's always the easiest for me...she has pretty terrible fiber, so I don't bother grooming her like I do the others.  I just blow the dust out (to save my shears), and go for it.  She always ends up with the best haircut too, since her fiber is so coarse and easy to cut with the shears.

First for a "real" grooming was Duque.  Luckily he was pretty clean, so just a bit of brushing and a bath and then his haircut.  He even got to spend the afternoon grazing in the garden with T while he dried.  Duque's fiber is going to be hoarded this year for a special project...details to come.

Duque and T in their garden pen.

Duque getting shorn.

Handsome boy!

T was next to get shorn.  He took a TON of brushing, and I didn't realize how dense his fiber was!  A couple hours later he was ready to blow out and wash.  He had to stay out overnight with Duque and Kara to dry.  He was not real happy about being shorn, but finally with a bit of a bribe we got it done. He got a complete body shear, and unfortunately I had to toss most of his neck and leg fiber since it was so full of burrs.  He looks a bit rough right now, but hopefully by the time the NY State Fair comes around in August he'll be grown out and look decent.  T's fleece has already been sold.

Last but not least was Kara.  She wasn't quite as dirty as T, but I'm planning to show her fleece this summer and fall, so she had to be impeccably clean.  Luckily she doesn't mind being groomed as much as T!  She also had to sit out for a couple days to dry since her fiber was so dense.  I decided to hand-shear her first so I could get the fleece without any second cuts, and for some reason she freaked out!  Once I started cleaning her up with the electric shears she was fine.  Weird girl!  I really hope her fleece does well at the shows!

Kara didn't want to stand up straight!

My gorgeous little herd of shorn lamas!  Pardon T's stance.

Llama Birthdays!

My mom thinks it is silly that I concern myself with remembering the birthdays of all our llamas (at least the ones we currently own), but I think it is important to remember their important milestones!

April is the big one this year...on Tuesday she turned 20 years old!!  They say that the average lifespan of a llama is 20-25 years, but the more I talk to breeders it seems not uncommon to lose a llama due to old age at 15-16 years old.  So, 20 is pretty old for a llama!

April was part of the second batch of llamas that we bought in the spring of 2000.  You can read her full biography here.

Baby April, back in 1994.

April in her prime, spring 2003.

April's crowning achievement...winning 1st in Heavy Wool Adult Female and 3rd overall Heavy Wool Female at the 2002 Great Lakes Regionals!

April as she looks now...this was spring 2013.  She hasn't changed much!

Duque's birthday is tomorrow...he will be 17!

Duque was part of the very first group of llamas we purchased in the fall of 1999.  You can read his full biography here.

Baby Duque with his mom, 1997.

Duque in his prime, spring 2003.

Duque's biggest achievement, Reserve Grand Champion Non-Breeder at the Great Lakes Regionals.

Duque as he looks now...this was spring 2013.  He is so grey!

Kara's birthday is at the end of the month...she'll be 2!

Fiber Forecast

While carding away at work today (I work at a local fiber mill, if I haven't mentioned that before...), I realized that I'm barely going to have any of my own fiber to work with this year!

I may be the only person who plans ahead this much, but I look forward to shearing so much each year that I fantasize about what I'm going to do with each fleece while I'm waiting.  Silly, maybe, but it helps pass the time!

Last week a woman from a nearby farm pre-ordered Kara and T's raw fleeces.  I was planning on having them blended together into roving, maybe with some bamboo, but I'm excited to see what she does with them instead!

T has a bit less fiber this year (he was body shorn last spring), but it is still the best on the farm!

I will still be showing Kara's fleece this year.  I need to decide how many shows I can afford to send it to...

I really need a more recent body shot of Kara!

April's fleece is too coarse for roving, so hers will be made into insoles with the rest of the neck/belly/leg fiber that I shear off the boys.

April has many great qualities, but fine fiber isn't one of them!  Luckily her crias had it!

The felted insoles I had made last year.

Duque's fleece is going to be made into a special project this year.  I'm going to wash, card, and spin it myself, and then knit a lace piece.  Details to come, I can't give too much away!

Good old Duque!  It is hard to believe that he was born almost coal black!

And last but not least is Ralph.  His fleece is the only one I will have available to get processed into roving!  Last year it was processed into a beautiful roving, with 20% brown merino wool and 10% red multi firestar.  It sold out pretty quick, so I might just have to repeat the blend!

Ralph with his terrible haircut.  Hopefully we'll get his legs trimmed better this year.

Ralph's roving blend from last summer.

Of course you could always purchase his fleece for yourself...it is available as part of our fiber CSA!

And in other news...today is April's birthday!  She turns 20 years old, which is quite a feat!

Baby April!

Locked Up Lamas

I really felt like a broken record this winter...it seemed like every other Facebook post was something along the lines of "locking the lamas in again tonight".

Locking the lamas inside the barn at night was not something I had really ever considered doing on a regular basis.  The one exception was when we had a baby born...we would routinely shut the new mom and baby in our catch pen/creep feeder (basically just an extra 8'x12' pen in our barn) for a night or two to bond and stay out of the cold.

May and her cria Camissia, locked in the catch pen for the night.

And then we moved to NY and had the winter from he**!  It dropped below 0 degrees more times this winter than I could count, and we often had wind chills in the double negative digits!  My Midwest lamas were definitely not use to this, and they were suffering.

April laying in one of her favorite spots, out by the hay feeder.

My preferred first treatment for the cold is insulated coats.  The only lamas that I saw shivering this winter were April, Duque, and Ralph.  They all wore coats through at least half of the winter; Duque and Ralph wore theirs a bit less than April.

Duque and Ralph in their coats.  Duque has since inherited April's coat, since April got a new thicker one!

It got so cold at times though that I would see April and Duque shivering, even with their coats on!  That's when I knew I had to do more to keep them warm.

Luckily the lamas' pen is on the south side of the barn, so the wind is normally not bad.  But in the cold winter, even a heavy breeze can drop the wind chill severely.  Since April apparently doesn't like being in the barn, the only way to keep her out of the wind was to lock her (and everyone else) inside the barn.

As I've mentioned before, I put down a lot of waste hay in the barn this winter for added insulation agains the cold.  So in addition to being out of the wind, they have the benefit of laying in a nice warm bed and not the cold concrete or frozen ground outside!

Nice bed of waste hay in the barn.

My threshold for locking the entire herd inside was whenever the temperatures were below 0 (Fahrenheit), or if the windchill was in the double negative digits.  There were a couple exceptions, mostly when it was warm and rainy and then supposed to get really cold quickly.  A few times I just locked April inside (in the catch pen) with a friend (usually Kara or Ralph).

April in the catch pen (eating her dinner).

Of course April hates being locked in the barn, but it has definitely helped keep her warm this winter.

During one extreme cold spell, the lamas stayed in the barn for 2 days and 3 nights (in a row)!

I even locked them in last night, even though the temperature was just under freezing.  They had been standing out in the rain all day, and the temperature was supposed to drop to almost 0 degrees during the night.  I went back outside this morning to feed, and found 5 happy, warm, and dry lamas, even though it was still in the single digits outside!  I put coats on the 3 regulars, and gave them their freedom.  Now that they're dry they'll be fine outside tonight.

And now for a little cheering up...SPRING!