Wow wouldya look at those legs! they go on forever! lol he gets that from his mommy, but pretty much everything else is identical to his dad:) I'm trying to find a baby picture of his dad but i'm coming up dry so far, I'll hafta keep looking.

Fall Baby #3!

WAS BORN YESTERDAY!!! he is SO identical to his daddy we can't even believe it!



Ain't he precious?:)

Aren't they ADORABLE?!? The brown boy is exactly one week older than the white boy, unfortunately we forgot to start thinking of names ahead of time and now they are still nameless.... but we are working on that!

Fall Babies

So i went out and took some ADORABLE pictures of the two of them, then my camera battery died. So i thought 'ok ill just hafta charge it them put up the pics. no big deal' well, my battery wont charge. then, because most of the technology in my house is ancient, nothing that has a spot for a memory card can handle a 4gig memory card. the computer, the printer, the other camera, all of it hates me. So i guess theres no pictures yet, SORRY!! :(

Happy Fall!

so after that baby was finally born, there really hasn't been much of anything going on here. summer was fun! but now its over, and im crazy busy again:P Finally a few weeks ago we got our first healthy baby of 2010!!! then one week ago we got the 2nd healthy baby!! so basically we are really exited to have some babies running around the fields again:) Ill post some pictures of them later, i don't have a lot of time right now, but i'm going to take some more pictures later today:)

catching up

Wow sorry I haven't posted in so long! School is coming to an end (too slowly) right now so I'm busy ALL THE TIME right now! First things first, tragedy has hit Blendon Pines. The baby we have been waiting so long for finally came, but it wasn't good. My mom was working last Tuesday and when I got home I found a bright white little boy laying on the ground, his mother was freaking out. He was a stillborn :'(. He was actually a blue-eyed-white, which is a very pretty animal, but it is a genetic fault that for some reason causes the animal to be deaf. Because of the deafness we try very hard to be careful with our breedings so we don't get blue-eyed-white babies. Unfortunately, if we had known then what we know now, we probably wouldn't have bred those two in the first place and this never would have happened. Alpaca researchers are still always trying to learn more about the animal and specifically the blue-eyed-white trait, so we decided to send him to a research center. The picture I posted is of a blue-eyed-white that we had a few years ago. She was deaf, but she was not stillborn (obviously...) and we sold her for her fiber.

The other thing on the agenda is the show! we got home at around 10:00 last night from a show in Flint MI. We brought 2 animals,

Captain Planet and Boomerang. Captain took a 3rd place against

some tough competition and Boomerang (my fave:) got FIRST!

pictures from the show should be posted soon!

misc.

Not much going on here at the ranch lately. Still waiting on that dumb baby:P oh and we gave away more poop yesterday:) pretty much everyone who has ever used it from us has called us and asked for it this year, plus they all keep telling their friends! My mom is so sick of bagging poop she could puke, but at least the pastures are staying clean!:) so i was walking down the hall after school today and a girl i haven't ever really talked to before was talking to some guys and stopped me and said "hey aren't alpacas like, a bit better than llamas?" i laughed:) cuz alpacas are a WHOLE LOT better. softer, warmer fleece than llamas, WAYYY cuter, worth a whole lot more, AND they don't spit NEAR as much. no offense if you like llamas, but they are ugly. if you like llamas, get alpacas. soon you will agree:) i mean just look at that!! the alpacas are way cuter. its just a fact.

or not...

ugh so now we are learning that girls due in the Spring tend to go longer than those due in the fall, and this is Starburst's first Spring baby. We also learned that for some reason lately girls going well into a year of pregnancy is not uncommon. Star is currently at 11 months and 3 weeks. AND on top of all that we learned that they tend to have longer pregnancies the older they get. Star is not old, but she is certainly getting up there. So now we're not sure if we are going to have the patience to wait for this baby. But for now we are hanging in there....

impatience.

im normally quite a patient person. But when it's the first baby of the year, i want it so badly!! and it's ridiculous because we watch Starburst, the girl that is due, and she is breathing heavy 24/7 now, her belly is practically dragging on the ground, but the girl just keeps eating. completely ridiculous.

Still waiting...!

Starburst is still (!) not letting that baby out! I personally have a strong feeling it'll be tomorrow tho, hope im right! The thing that confirms my feeling most is how uncomfortable they both are (both meaning Starburst and her baby). I was looking out the window today and she was laying down, got up and tried to graze, got sick of that and laid down again, rolled, then spread out on her side, belly sticking way up in the air. It was kinda comical actually! :) so then later i went out to check on her, thats when i noticed how uncomfortable the baby was too! as i watched, i saw a big lump (probably a head) push against one side then a HUGE rolling motion inside her gigantic belly. lol It's oddly entertaining to watch a majorly prego belly! especially when it's not human...cuz then it kinda feels awkward... :/

Bust or Baby??

This pregnant lady is HUGE! she is still hanging on to that baby though, and we are starting to wonder if she is just gonna bust open instead of going through labor! lol thank goodness that isn't actually possible! but it's honestly hard to believe her belly can even stretch that far lol imagine those stretch marks. ouch. :/ I'll post as soon as the baby is born i promise! :)

Fertilizer anyone?

lol FREE FERTILIZER!!! :) my mom doesn't like having piles of poop all over the place but we have WAYY to much to use it all in our garden! Soooooo my mom made a solution! She rakes it, scoops it, then loads it into empty feed bags. haa thats what she was working on today because it's amazing how many people call us every spring looking for some fertilizer! sounds crazy. i know it does. but if you tasted some of the veggies and berries we grow in our garden, u would b begging for some too:D

Now Days.....

Right now Blendon Pines Alpaca Ranch owns 22 and 1/2 alpacas. (the half means we share ownership of an animal.) 8 and 1/2 are boys and the rest are girls. Many were born here, some sold or traded away, and a few were boughten. We are currently waiting for 3 babies. One of our original girls, Starburst, looks like she is about to explode!! Her due date was technically today, but alpacas have more of a range and don't often go on an exact date. Their range is usually 11-11 and 1/2 months, although sometimes maidens go closer to 1 year. (The picture above is an old picture of a little boy named Southern Cross. We sold his mom before he was born, so he was never ours, but he lived on our farm for a few months until he was old enough to travel.)

BABIES!

Finally, the phone call came!!! The news was that we had a BEAUTIFUL rose grey Girl. Rose Grey is a very wanted color in the alpaca industry and we were incredibly exited. Girls are also much more wanted in general than boys because all girls can be bred, but only the BEST boys are worth breeding. I guess it was beginners luck, because a lot of ranchers were jealous:) (sorry i dont have any of her baby pictures anymore, not sure where they went....) After about a month, newly named, Autumn Mist came home with her mother for the first time. Of course by then we already had two more babies, so she had plenty of friends to play with.

Our First Animals

After looking at many farms and figuring out what qualities to look for in each of the two breeds, Suris and Huacayas (pronounced wacayas), we decided which to buy. First, we got two Suris, one was pregnant and the other was her daughter who was still a maiden but ready to breed. We bought then from a farm a few miles away from our own farm. Then we got Huacayas. We ended up getting 4 Huacayas, all pregnant, from southern Indiana. 3 of them were trailered up to us in Michigan as soon as possible, while the 4th was too close to her due date to travel. The first 5 got settled in nicely and we waited impaciently for the phone call announcing our first cria (baby alpaca)

Getting Started

Blendon Pines Alpaca Ranch has been running for about 4 years now. (I wish i had started this at the beginning of our business!) We first became aware of alpacas when my mother and brother went to Ecuador, a country in South America. Alpacas and alpaca products are all over the place there, so when they came home and told the family about the alpacas, we decided to look into them. My mom& I are HUGE animal people and my dad is a business guy. so, learning how good of an investment alpacas are, the whole family agreed that we should get started.