Monday, July 6, 2009

A New Llama

I always get emotional when my sheep leave here to go to a new farm. I know they'll be fine, but they don't understand where they are going or why they are leaving their sheep friends and the only home they've every known. So it's stressful... for all of us.

Well, we had a new llama arrive a couple weeks ago. We use llamas as guard animals to protect the sheep from coyotes primarily. If provoked, the llama would stomp the coyote. Sometimes just the sheer intimidation and vocal alarming is enough to scare them away.

Anyway, my friend Dawn who owns Carmen Llama Ranch in St. Paris, OH has brought me two other llamas and she needed a home for Care Bear, a female llama. So she has come to live with us.

Dawn and Lloyd arrived with CareBear in their trailer. I walked her into the ewe pasture filled with new moms and lots of lambs. CareBear was naturally curious and wanted to meet everyone which basically amounted to her chasing them. After a bit, I let her go and we watched for quite a while and things seemed to be ok.

... about 5 minutes after Dawn and her husband left, Preston and I went into the ram pasture to let the rams into their new grazing area. We look up and see Care Bear prancing from around the old barn and down the driveway!!! Apparently she didn't understand why she was being left behind and was going to let them know they forgot her!

... at this point Valur (our dog) sees her and starts to run after her. We were able to get Valur to come back and saw that Care Bear had gone past the house, but veered onto the lawn down towards the garden which is fenced all around. So Preston raced down the driveway on his tractor to close our gate. After a few minutes I was able to coax her into the pasture where Dudley & Mora were. They were still separate from the new moms. So I thought I'd best leave her there with just the two sheep for a couple days to get used to her surroundings without having to worry about a bunch of lambs and protective moms.

A few days later, I combined everyone together and she had calmed down considerably. She was so intent on taking in every square inch of her new surroundings. I knew then she would make a good guard llama.

She did see her first deer every and it was funny to watch ... it was an alarming llama / snorting deer match for about 10 minutes before the deer ran off. If you've never heard a llama alarm, the only thing I can compare it to is a turkey gobble.

I can tell she is taking her job seriously. The moms tend to get eating and forget about the where-abouts of their lambs and CareBear tends to them and keeps and eye on them. And I could tell the sheep had accepted her when they "let her" into the shelter with them when it was raining.
;)

Yesterday I went outside and saw a deer down toward the bridge. CareBear was busy eating and I called to her that there was a deer. She looked up and saw the deer and immediately took action to shoo it away.

Dawn chronicled her visit here on her blog. You can see more photos there ... http://dawnanewday.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html Scroll down to Fri, June 5th. You will learn about llama shearing and then there are photos from her visit here.

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