2010 Shearing is Over:
Monday, May 3rd we held shearing day at Desert Mountain Alpaca Ranch in Hereford, AZ. Originally we were supposed to shear on Thursday, April 29th but had to rearrange when our regular shearer, Pete Connelly, found himself in the hospital fighting an infection after cutting his knee with a shearing blade sharpener. Of course this would happen to Pete one week before shearing and as you all know finding a shearer at this time of year is close to impossible; however, Pete found us another shearer so with just moving the shearing a few days Mike Morgan came to shear.
Moving shearing day was not the easiest for us. Tom was scheduled to be in GA for training and my volunteers had rearranged their work schedules to be here on Thursday. We ended up losing some volunteers and Tom had to make other arrangements for work.
Another change for us was that Mike Morgan doesn’t trim teeth. This was sort of a blessing in disguise for me as I’ve been wanting to trim teeth ourselves for a couple of years now. Luckily a while back I traded transporting for a slightly used tooth-a-matic machine. Tom took it to work a few days before shearing and did some slight adjustments and we were ready. To my surprise Tom actually cut the alpacas teeth without asking me to do it. (If you know Tom at all you know he doesn’t do anything to the alpaca except to hold it). I was so proud of him but to tell you the truth if he didn’t do it I wouldn’t have been able to as Mike was so quick with shearing I barely had time to collect up the fiber before running to the next alpaca. Now that we are going to Georgia where the alpacas can graze it is even more important that their teeth are in the right shape.
We sheared 32 alpacas between 9 and 2:30 PM. Mike could have been done earlier but us old people (Tom) couldn’t keep up with him. You could see Tom slowing down as he brought each new alpaca in.
We had socks filled with rumen in which I collected immediately in a freezer zip lock bag. Tom froze them afterwards and we now have liquid gold. All that we will have to do is defrost the socks soak them in water and then drench up the rumen. We didn’t realize how precious this stuff is until we had an alpaca who stopped eating a couple of years ago. Luckily we were able to get a prego to spit back then but now we collect it at shearing and freeze.
Special thanks goes out to Pete Connelly (we will be using Pete next year) for finding us another shearer, Mike Morgan and his wife for shearing, and to my volunteers….James, Lisa, Laurel and most of all my mom for recording all the fleece weights.
Now it’s time to skirt the show fleeces and to figure out which fleeces are going to the fiber festivals and which I am going to have processed.
