Whisky with rain water!

What a week for shearing!  On Monday, James & Kym arrived after shearing on Skye, did our boys and  3 other small local herds then moved on to Jayne at Zanzibah.  We got the best day of the week as Tuesday turned out to be a dreadful day although Zanzibah were sheared as you will have seen from Jayne's blog.  The weather for the rest of the week stayed wet with sunny spells.  This played havoc with James's shearing list and he will be returning to finish off those he could not shear.  I think we all know how differently many of the alpacas behave as soon as they are sheared as they look different, and perhaps smell slightly different to each other after the fleece comes off.  This is Faro, herd guard, immediately after shearing when he strutted his stuff around the paddock.

The rest of the boys are in the catch pen waiting to be sheared and can't quite understand why Faro looks so different.  Faro paraded in front of them for quite a while as if to say, "It's OK guys, it's me - honest!"  Then as each boy in turn was sheared there was a lot of smelling of each other and quite a bit of spitting until things settled down.

No chance of mistaking Wee Eck, even after shearing, with those big radar scanner lugs and his shiny tooth!

What a poppet - Fergus!

Gully looking a little bewildered shortly after the clip - but he soon recovered and was running around with the others, jumping in the air, high kicking with his back legs and obviously pleased to have his fleece off.

Rufus has ended up looking rather elegant after the clip.  He had his protruding teeth seen to and his fighting teeth snipped but he didn't enjoy that part of the procedure.  Within minutes however he was grazing peacefully with the others. 

And finally....... as we have a bachelor herd we can't compete with all the lovely cria photos from the other blogs.   However, friends Angie & Ian had a visit from James on Fri morning but unfortunately the animals were too wet to shear.   Coco (mum) had a due date some time in July, but 2 hours after James had visited she decided that as shearing wasn't an option and the rain had stopped, she might as well give birth to Whisky.  This is Angie and Ian's first alpaca birth, so well done you two and Coco - and welcome to Whisky country  -  Whisky!