More optimistic now

When I wrote the last post the mother and baby alpacas were both looking quite knackered, it was raining, and I was feeling a bit traumatised by the whole experience. But the sun has come out, Jemima has got the hang of her legs with impressively few tumbles, and she may even have suckled -- she certainly had her head in the right place and was making slurpy noises. But she at least seems to understand that she ought to. It can be very frustrating when baby alpacas are just standing up, because they seem to have an innate sense that there is good stuff to be had somewhere around their mother's undercarriage, but aren't sure where or what, and you have to watch them tentatively licking their mothers' shoulders or other unproductive bits of anatomy for quite a while before they get it right. Anyway, I'm pretty sure she has suckled now, and hopefully all will be well! Hurray! Because she's really a very lovely little alpaca. Here is some footage of when she had just got the hang of standing up, and knew there was something she ought to be doing:

But she missed.

She's brown because her father is a champion brown alpaca, and has even held his own at shows against white alpacas, which tend to be of a much higher quality. A lot of effort has gone into breeding very good white alpacas, and coloured alpacas tend to lag behind, and look a bit more like llamas than is ideal. If Jemima's going to be a good quality brown alpaca, and it looks like it, then she's a very good thing indeed.