Instant llama’s gonna get you.
This is Ladybug the alpaca, one of the residents at the Blood Moon Alpaca Farm, near Erin, Ontario. The farm held an open day on Sunday and we went along to have a curious snuffle.
The common alpaca and I share a lot of things: we both eat a lot of greens, we both have hair that just goes absolutely everywhere when you try to comb it, and we both react to heat in the same way. We lie on the ground motionless.
Here are some fun facts about alpacas I learnt today.
1. Alpacas are not llamas! (Which kind of messes up the title of this post, really. Oh well.) But they are camelids, like llamas, and er, camels.
2. Alpacas have expressed no opinion on whether they prefer Canada to Peru! (No news is good news!)
3. The gestation period of an alpaca is 345 days, and a baby alpaca is called a cria!
4. More names – a mother is a dam, a father is a sire, and a male alpaca used for breeding is called a macho!
5. Alpacas have soft pads on their feet and leave the roots in the soil when they eat grass: thus, they sustainably manage their own food supply!
6. Alpaca fleece can be made into wool with no extra treatment, and comes in 22 colours. The release of Adobe Photoshop with ALPACA-PANTENE (TM) colours pre-installed is surely imminent.
7. Lots of cute pictures of alpacas on one’s blog can make one’s hits go through the roof!!
8. Alpacas generally live anything from 15 to 25 years old.
9. But one alpaca is so old that he regularly gets mistaken by police for being Bob Dylan!
10. You can never have too many pictures of alpacas.
And just to prove I was in Canada, and hadn’t slunk off to the Andes this weekend…
There we go. I’m still working on seeing my first moose and skunk, but I think I’ve got alpacas pretty firmly covered now.
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