I can’t avoid mentioning how hot it is and how difficult some of us find that and how hot it is for our alpacas. Checking them and feeding and ensuring that they have cool clean fresh water is hard when you can barely see where you are going for the sweat in your eyes. The lunchtime trek to make sure everyone has water and that it is cool for them is not much fun at all. I like to feel the water and if its warm I release it and allow the drinkers to refill. In the daytime we keep a couple of buckets of water in the nursery areas so that the little ones can access water easily and these always need a refill of fresh cool water around midday.

All of our cria are now on the ground and doing well. They were sheared last week and it went very well. The Mums and babies were all kept together in a group and one cria at a time was removed from the pen onto the shearing mat next to the pen. Shearing was quick and they went straight back into the pen and without exception found their Mum straight away and had a feed. They look very cute and we look forward to seeing their beautiful fleeces without the detritus that they usually pick up.

Our barn is full of hay for which we are thankful and although we make hay available to the alpacas all year round they are not eating much at the moment. We live on the Somerset Levels where fields are usually surrounded by water filled ditches and rhynes and this keeps our fields more resistant to drought and so we still have reasonable levels of grazing. In the winter when it rains heavily water is released from the rhynes into nearby rivers so that the land doesn’t flood. This land management system was put in place in the 17^th century and has served the area well since that time.”

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