Wet Wet Wet

Well, Elif certainly chose a good day for the birth. It was very possibly the last warm day of the year!

Towards the end of the lovely sunny Monday that was baby's birthday, the clouds began to gather, and Simon broke the news that the forecast was for lots of rain, followed by cold weather. Great.

Sure enough, about four in the morning on Tuesday the heavens opened. I lay in bed listening to the rain gurgling into the gutters, and whilst this rare sound would recently have filled me with nothing but glee at the prospect of a well-watered garden, on this occasion it filled me with a heart-sinking anxiety. I debated getting out of bed and driving up to he field to check that the newest addition to the herd wasn't lying sodden and drowned in a muddy puddle, or shaking uncontrollably with hypothermia. But rationally I knew that, without an easily accessible closed barn into which mother and baby could be safely cajoled, there was nothing much we could do. We certainly couldn't take the baby away from Elif as she needed to suckle, and in any case, there was nowhere to take her to. So I lay there worrying pointlessly, waiting for the dawn, and hoping that Elif was a sensible-enough llama to keep her young one at her side in the shelter out of the rain.

At first light it was reassuring to see that the baby was clearly still alive and bouncing. It was also immensely frustrating to see that she and Elif were the only llamas not huddled in the shelter to keep out of the driving rain. For some reason Elif seemed to prefer the rain to the close sociability of the shelter, and she and the baby were kushed at the top of the field well away from the road and the rest of the group.

The rain continued relentlessly throughout the day, and the baby continued relentlessly to get wet. When I went up to put fresh hay in the shelter, Elif came down to eat some, but the baby insisted on slip-sliding about on the slippery slopes, and kushing in muddy puddles. I couldn't believe that this skinny little bundle of soggy wool and bones would survive in the ever-cooling wind-chill of the first wintery day of the year.

But she has. And even though the temperature has continued to drop (with a forecast of zero degrees for tonight), she seems to be doing fine. Still, I guess the mountains in Chile must get pretty chilly sometimes.....

First Steps . . . . . The Video

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It could take a while for the video to load, so be patient. It's just a rough cut - no commentary or fancy editing!

First Steps

Just like pots that don't boil, watched llamas don't give birth. You can spend hours at a time studying the moment to moment activities of a pregnant llama, searching vainly for any signs of an impending delivery, and then just within the few moments it takes to grab a quick breakfast of coffee and a croissant, out pops a baby.

Having been expecting Elif to give birth any time since August, we have watched and studied and considered her physical appearance and behaviour. We have read all the relevant books and internet articles we could find about llama births. We knew what we were looking for - we'd even had the experience of Fatma and Capucine only 6 months ago. Were Elif's teats 'bagging up'? Was her fat belly changing shape as the baby 'dropped' prior to birth? Was Elif behaving differently? Taking herself away from the herd? Not eating? Showing signs of discomfort?

Was she hell. Nothing. All we could do was keep checking and watching, and hope we didn't totally miss the Big Moment.

At least we managed to get there quicker this time. In retrospect, we realise that by the time we noticed that Fatma had given birth, her baby must already have been at least an hour old. This time, the sight of Elif adopting the pooing pose to expel the placenta was the first clue we had that anything was happening/had happened. We wasted no time. We grabbed a bag of llama food, the cameras, some carrier bags (for the placenta) and a kitchen roll (clean towels anyone?) and jumped into the car.

As we arrived at the gate, all the other llamas headed down to greet us as normal. Elif was clearly in two minds about joining them - nothing comes between her and food these days. But we quickly occupied the others with their daily rations in the catch-pen, and headed up towards the field shelter where Elif was standing by the fence with a very bedraggled bundle of fluff and slime at her feet, and a shiny bag of placenta hanging between her back legs.

The bedraggled bundle was wriggling around, all a-tremble, all legs and feet and long neck, struggling pathetically to stand up on its ridiculously concertina-d limbs. Elif had considerately dropped her load on the ever-growing bed of uneaten hay that has collected in front of the field shelter over recent weeks. A nice soft landing for the baby indeed. But also perilously close to the wire netting of the fence, at the sloping bottom of the hill. The wriggling baby thrashed around in a tumult of dry hay, dusty mud and twigs, endlessly defeated in its gallant attempts to stand up on elastic legs by the cruel combination of gravity and the incline of the land.

It was painful to watch. We held our breath each time it managed to get one corner of its tiny body perched in the air atop a strangely bent leg, willing it on in its mammoth endeavour, only to let out exasperated sighs as it toppled over again into a crumpled heap. We watched helplesslessly as its wrigglings pulled it further downhill, closer and closer to the bottom of the wire fence. It was only a matter of time before its tiny head, sliding back and forth on the end of its snaking neck, would find itself on the wrong side of the fence.

Sure enough it did. And although we had been keeping a repectful distance so as not to interfere with mother nature, things were getting nasty. Elif did not take kindly to my approach, as I moved in ready to lift the wire and pull the baby's head back inside. She stuck her face very close to mine and I could hear the gurgling sounds of semi-digested food making its angry way back up her long throat in readiness for the almighty spit that was sure to come my way if I did not back off. I hastily reconsidered my approach.

Wishing the road-side boundary wasn't so long, I headed off back down through the two gates and out on to the other side of the fence, making my way carefully (but speedily) back up the fence line, balancing precariously on the thin thorny, stumpy ledge above the road, to where the baby's head was sticking through. Although aware that the fence would not protect me from a good spitting, I did at least feel safe from a possible trampling-to-death by an over-protective mother.

Aware of our responsibilities to our audience, Simon remained inside the field with the video-camera. Unfortunately however, my life-saving act of heroism was not recorded for posterity. Possibly Simon was overcome with the drama of the moment and allowed his battle-zone camera skills to lapse. Possibly he was busy deleting stuff from the camera's memory to make space for new footage. Either way, he didn't capture this bit of excitement for the blog, so you will just have to take my word for it. He did however, have the sensible idea of piling up hay against the fence to prevent a repeat occurrence.

The baby had a little inert rest. Elif eyed us suspiciously. We waited.

The wriggling began again, and eventually, after much lifting of the back end on two legs, followed by headlong flat-on-the-face falls when the front legs wouldn't stay rigid, the baby managed to get up into a precarious pose with its front feet facing the wrong way. It seemed an impossible position, and for a few moments I was convinced the baby had either broken both ankles, or was seriously deformed.

After a few more face-in-the-mud tumbles, and another head-through-the-wire escapade (this time remedied by a hasty, adrenalin-induced grab-and-pull approach, oblivious to the ominous gurglings of the anxious mother), the baby was up. All four legs out straight. All joints correctly aligned. Swaying....staggering.......and flomp! Down and flat, with it all to do again.

And so passed many happy minutes in the lovely October sunshine. Up....yes?...Yes?......No! The village clock struck eleven. My God! This had been going on for more than an hour already.

Eventually, the length of the Up moments began to exceed the time spent floundering at ground level, and we watched in awe as the baby quickly learnt to adjust its balance to the vagaries of the uneven surface and the precarious slope. A few of the funnier cartoon moments (when the baby's downhill velocity exceeded its ability to stay in directional control, resulting in full-on collisions with small tree trunks) were missed by the camera-man, who had very responsibly remembered that our poor, long-suffering dog, Max, had been waiting patiently for his morning walk attached to a tree by his lead outside the gate.

By the time Simon returned from walking the dog, the baby had got the whole business of staying upright pretty much cracked, so now we just had to wait for the next important development - suckling.

I recalled Capucine's early hours on this planet, and remembered that it had taken her a surprisingly long time to get the hang of this apparently instinctive behaviour. We had waitied for at least an hour, while she stumbled around under various non-mother llamas, looking for the milk bar, until she eventually decided to stick with Fatma, and limit her searching to a smaller area. Due to Elif's highly developed mothering skills, there was little chance of this baby looking in completely the wrong place. Elif was making damn sure that her baby didn't stray more than a couple of yards from her side, and she wasn't being exactly welcoming of the attention coming the baby's way from the rest of the herd. So all this baby had to do was find the right end, the right position and the right sucking action.

How could it take SO LONG? Time ticked by. We watched and waited and watched and waited. The baby stumbled around trying here, then there, then almost there, then somewhere else completely. Elif tried to help. She stood still. She nudged the baby in the right direction. She encouraged the baby back to its feet for another try, whenever it gave up and flopped down. She repositioned herself. Again and again. So close.....but no. Nearly....but no. And then, after about another hour, the unmistakeable sounds of sucking combined with the sign of the baby's tail in the up-and-connected position, brought to us all the long-awaited sense of relief.

Everything was going to be alright. The weather was good. The baby was healthy and suckling. Elif took a break to wolf down some hay, while keeping a very close eye on the little one, who kushed down exhausted behind the field shelter, to dry off in the sunshine. And we went home for a bit of lunch.

By the afternoon, the baby was cavorting around the field like a crazy thing, finding out just what those strange long legs were capable of, and Elif was bad-temperedly following her around, clearly wishing it was baby bed-time.

Some baby pictures

A few more cria pictures on our Picasa site

Enjoy!

A baby at last!

After weeks and weeks of wondering where Elif's baby had got to . . . . Is she really pregnant or just getting amazingly fat? . . . . . This morning, without fuss, she gave birth to a female cria

Within a couple of hours, the baby (as yet un-named) was staggering round and working out how to suckle from her mother. More pictures later, and video of the baby's antics.

Normal

Oh dear. Another three weeks have passed without a blog entry. Shame on us! Excuses this time? A week's visit from Simon's Mum and Dad, followed by a stint of time helping my sister and bro-in-law to renovate their village house in time for a tenancy arrangement starting on 15 October.

Simon's parents got the usual Welcome to the Roquetaillade Llama-and-Chicken Experience, albeit without the llama walking activity.

Valentine overcame his misgivings about approaching big metal things containing strangers to eat a little snack from Simon's Mum's hand out of the landrover...

...and Capucine astounded us by taking her first ever piece of hand-fed carrot from his Dad, despite the ominous presence of an unusual big stick.


As is often the case when we have visitors, we found ourselves looking at our surroundings with holiday eyes, taking some time just to sit and enjoy the sunshine and the views, and to really appreciate the loveliness of October in this climate. However, the family visits are over for the time being (more planned for November), and for the moment things are back to normal.

Normal? Now there's an interesting concept.

According to Ellen Goodman, (no, I don't know who she is either...)

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

I guess, not so long ago, that was sort of Normal for us too. And, to friends and colleagues still fully enagaged in the life we left behind, our current Normal wouldn't seem normal at all. Our days now consist of a limited range of repetitive activities involving the care, feeding and cleaning of our animals (and of ourselves). We rarely use the car, we wear the same old stuff day in, day out (not much change there, come to think of it...), and we are at home pretty much all the time, when we're not out with the animals.

Life is simple and, well, ordinary. It seems hard to think of anything to write about when every day is so similar to the one before.

The most notable event of the last week was the discovery last Sunday morning of a gaping, two-metre-wide hole in the fence of the Breeders' field, just in front of the field shelter. Simon had gone over to the Rough Land to visit the Walkers, and I had done my usual morning stuff with the Breeders. I noticed Fatma's halter was missing, and assumed she had managed to pull it off whilst foraging through the fence for a delicious bit of ash tree on the other side - it was quite loose after all. I thought little more of it, until I carried a fresh bale of hay up to the shelter, turned round to admire the view back to the village, and saw a big space where the fence should have been.

Someone had cut the wire grill in a big L shape and bent back the fencing, leaving the field open straight on to the road. It took me a while to actually believe what I was seeing. After all - the llamas were all present and correct, and behaving quite normally. Putting the fact of the hole together with the fact of the missing halter, I constructed in my imagination a scenario of attempted animal theft, in which Fatma had managed to evade capture by wriggling out of her halter - and for once I was thankful that llamas can be so hard to catch. But why (or indeed how) anyone would try to steal llamas by cutting the fence, and pulling them down a steep bank on to the road, instead of just opening the gate, baffled me.

Needless to say, I effected a hasty repair, tying the fencing together with the baler twine I'd just removed from the hay, and called Simon on his mobile with the interesting news. Cunningly hiding his disappointment that I wasn't ringing to inform him of an impending llama birth behind his normal, run-of-the-mill crisis-response tone, Simon formulated a well-considered plan of action. "Stay there, I'm coming."

Luckily we still had a bit of a roll of fencing left in the garage, so we collected all the neccessary bits and bobs and returned to replace the damaged panel. Of course it took longer than we expected - all our careful tensioning of the whole length of the road-side fence had depended on the integrity of the fencing wire - but we managed an adequate fix that looked almost as good as new. Clearly the llamas were in no hurry to go walkabout (not even Capucine, who regularly pokes her head through the fence to eat, just like Ana used to do), so I was not really concerned that they would escape. I just didn't want any sharp bits where their foraging necks might be leaning.

A later conversation with our neighbour resulted in the dogmatic verdict that it wasn't attempted theft, but was a personal attack by a crazy, jealous person who wanted to cause us difficulty and the expense of the repair. Apparently, the same thing had happened to them when they used to keep horses on the land, although they had suffered more, because the horses had actually got out, and had to be rounded up from the road. They advised us to take photos of the damage and to report it to the gendarmarie.

Too late for the photos, and, we decided, not much point in reporting it. Best to just ignore it and try not to get paranoid. I figured that causing a fuss would probably give the perpetrator something to watch and enjoy, and that the zen thing to do would be to forgive and forget, and carry on as normal with a friendly smile for everyone we come across. Of course the paranoia sneeks in now and then, followed by a cascade of negative thinking in which everyone in the village hates and resents us, and will not cease to hound and harrass us until we give up and leave, with our sad and sorry outsiders' tails hanging dejectedly between our immigrant legs.

But a week has gone by. All is Quiet on the Western Front, and the paranoia is fading away in the mid-October sunshine. Our training activities with the Walkers continue with gradually increasing levels of challenge. We now often take Valentine and Ana out together, as Duc seems quite happy to spend a little bit of time on his own. He is very much the leader of their little herd, and as such has developed a bit of a Man-Alone demeanour, often to be found grazing apart from the other two, and a bit higher up the hill.

And in attempting to close the gap toward the goal of bringing the llamas right into the village, Simon has begun walking Duc and Valentine along a track that circles just outside the boundary of habitation, in full view of the children cavorting noisily on the tiny play area next to the village hall, and of the variously stationed platoon of barking dogs that inhabit our end of the village. This route also brings them into full view of the Breeders, who watch with curiousity and wariness from their splendid vantage point higher up the road. Pedro, in particular, watches the progress of these upstart threats to his herd dominance with a rigid posture and unwavering gaze, following the direction of their walking long after they have actually disappeared from sight.

The mysterious cause of Elif's increase in size remains to be determined. Still no offspring. Still no diminishing of her appetite.

Always at the front of the queue to get into the shelter with the fresh hay....









...and always the one with her nose in the bag looking for any remaining morsels of breakfast, when the others have accepted that it really is "All Gone".

I'm still uncertain as to whether I should be feeding her up in preparation for an impending birth, or putting her on a diet to lose the flab. Either way, it's so hard to resist those big brown eyes when she gets up close with her warm breath on my face, and looks hopefully toward the food bag when I'm zipping it up, as if to say, " Just one more mouthful....go on....pleeeease."