by Parks, Alan
The next step was how to hold them correctly. We were all pretty inexperienced, but having had to handle them for husbandry procedures, such as toe nail clipping and injections, we normally employed the ‘hold the head as tight as possible’ technique that often involved alpaca wrestling (as demonstrated by Rafa). Julie taught us a restraining method called the ‘bracelet’, where the animal is held firmly at the back of the head and then supported under the chin. This way it is more relaxed and doesn’t feel the urge to fight. It also involves standing behind its eye line. Once the alpaca was under our spell, we were able to practice the massage/T-touching techniques. This did seem to be working and these ‘never handled’ animals were responding well. We were all thrilled and there was a bit of a buzz amongst us as to how we could apply what we had learnt once we got home.
We then gathered on the mirador, the poolside veranda, built to take advantage of those fabulous views, for lunch. A group of four alpaca owners from New Zealand had joined us, and there were about 20 people sitting around a large table. There were some vegetarians so Barbara had catered for everybody with them in mind… stuffed peppers all round. I was a bit horrified given my fussy eating habits so resigned myself to a bread-only meal. But then Barbara called me into the kitchen.
“Alan, I know you said you were fussy, so I bought you a steak. I hope you don’t mind?” She proceeded to unwrap the biggest T-bone steak imaginable. “The only thing is, you have to cook it yourself!”
“Sounds good to me,” I said beaming.
So I spent a good 20 minutes in Barbara’s magnificent kitchen making sure the steak was cooked through while she prepared the other meals. The timing was perfect; just as the steak was ready Barbara was dishing up. I followed out with my enormous piece of meat and was greeted by jealous whispers and jeering. They all wanted it. I felt somewhat embarrassed!
After a leisurely lunch it was back out to the alpacas. As we approached the training area we could see what looked like an assault course: small jumps, bars for them to go under and finishing off with a trailer on which to lead the animal. As we looked at each other, you could sense us all thinking, “No way is that going to happen!”
You wouldn’t believe how well the alpacas did: some went round the whole course and into the trailer, and some only did certain obstacles. Very impressive. For the final segment of the day we were taught easy ways to administer injections and clip toenails, all of which these wild animals took completely in their stride. We would be going home with new weapons in our armoury to help us care for these amazing creatures. We also all went home with an array of plastic sticks, ropes and halters that we bought at the end of the course. We were very grateful to Julie for coming to help us.
Chapter 22
Ever Increasing Circles
If you have never owned chickens you haven't lived. Since acquiring two at the local farmers’ bingo night and then buying another six, my world has been brightened daily by these fascinating creatures. Go out and buy some chickens for your garden; you won’t regret it.
When we first brought Beyonce and JLo home, followed by the gaggle of Aunties, we kept them in their coop. (This, by the way, is an old stable, with feed troughs lined with alpaca fleece for beds… no luxury spared.) They remained there for a couple of weeks to get used to their new environment in the hope that they would return when the time came to lay eggs. At this point they were scraggy little birds, with sparse feathers and no combs on the top of their heads.
After a period of time, the Aunties began to get restless, trying to get through holes in the old wooden door or attacking me at feeding time and attempting to make a break for it. So we decided to release them to their freedom. For the first few days, they only ventured out a short distance, every so often running back to the safety of their coop.
When they first came into contact with the alpacas, there was a tense stand-off as Marcus, one of the grey boys, and Galaxy, our beautiful brown boy, stared warily at them. Slowly they inched their way forward and after a few moments which could have gone either way, Galaxy lifted his head, jumped off the ground with all four feet and starting pronking around the paddock, running and throwing his back legs in the air like a spring lamb. One by one, the others joined in and before long we had five alpacas bouncing around the field in perfect unison. A beautiful sight, as I am sure all alpaca owners will agree.
As the weeks passed, we began to see the girls getting braver and venturing further from their coop. When we brought fresh hay to the alpacas they would love to scratch through it to find seeds, and very often we would see them sitting atop of the boys’ feeder, the highest point in the paddock.
We also noticed the girls squeezing themselves underneath the gate where the alpacas live to search for worms, grubs and insects in the weeds on the other side. We really didn’t want them straying too far as they could easily escape on to the road. So, I attached some extra wire fencing at the bottom of the gate to keep them in. It worked, but not for long. Eventually the chickens pushed their way through any little gap they could find. Occasionally we would see a chicken running off back to the coop, and then we would go and check to see if there were any eggs.
One day when we were putting them to bed, Lorna squealed “The first egg. We’ve got one. It must be Auntie Eileen, she’s been letting you pick her up for ages, and you know on the Internet it said that meant they thought you were their cockerel!”
A few days later, I went to check on the girls but could only find four of them. I looked in the coop to discover Auntie Eileen sitting in one of the boxes. As I approached her, she pushed her body down and lifted her wings up, as she does when she wants me to pick her up - or indeed mount her, as is her natural instinct! I gave her a little stroke and decided I would stay and watch, as I had never seen a chicken laying an egg and the process fascinated me.
I moved away and stood and watched her for a while. She relaxed and sat back down before going into what I can only describe as a kind of trance-like state, staring at a point on the wall. After a few minutes, she started to pick up individual pieces of straw and seemingly throw them on her back and push them down her sides. Then she slowly started to, for want of a better word, ‘purr’, almost like a quiet engine revving and building up to a quiet cluck, cluck, cluck before reverting to silent staring. After repeating this process, Auntie Eileen stood and fluffed her tail feathers. This is it, I thought, and went in closer to watch the impending ‘birth’. But to no avail, she sat back down and resumed her intent staring.
Eventually after much to-ing and fro-ing and an awful lot of frenzied clucking, she stood up and started clenching her back end (I guess very similar to human contractions). Gradually a pink fleshy area started to appear from her back opening. Now, although I learnt biology at school, and I have seen eggs with chicken poo on them, to be honest I wasn’t entirely sure if they came from a chicken’s bottom or not. Having looked it up on the Internet later, I learnt that this opening is called a vent, and it is indeed where both the eggs and waste are expelled. This vent increased in size with each contraction and more of the fleshy pink sleeve started to poke out. All of a sudden you could see an egg pushing through and dropping on the nest, while the sleeve retracted slowly back into the vent.
Auntie Eileen was visibly out of breath and took a few moments to compose herself before jumping off the nest and going about her merry way. I have since discovered that chickens vacate the nest immediately as this means the embryo inside the egg goes into a kind of suspended animation and the mother can raise a clutch of up to 12 eggs and assure that they all hatch at the same time. Amazing, huh? Now every time I collect eggs, I marvel at how incredible they are. To top that off there is nothing better than eating scrambled eggs from your own chickens.
“One of the chickens is outside the fence, I’m going out to get her in,” I said to Lorna one day.
The chickens had started to escape under our fence to the undergrowth at the side of the track. They usually came
back in of their own accord eventually, but I worried that they might get run over or be mauled by a loose dog so I'd go out, grab them and throw them back over the fence. They would flap madly as they ‘flew’ back to earth.
“Need any help? Do you want me to come with you?” asked Lorna.
“It’s a nice day, you might as well come.”
So we went out to round up the errant birds. As we walked down the hill, we could only see one of the chickens and she seemed to have made her way back under the fence.
“Maybe it’s egg time?” Lorna suggested.
We looked around the usual haunts, under trees and in the weeds, but there was no sign.
“Wait, shhh, I can hear something,” I said.
So we both held our breath and, sure enough, there was a faint clucking.
“Over there I think,” pointed Lorna. “Down by the river. There.”
We peered over the edge of the muddy bank that runs down to the river’s edge, and there they were, four happy chickens scraping through the mud and pecking away.
“I’ll go down and grab them. Hopefully they will crouch down, like they normally do, and I’ll bring them up and you can throw them over,” I said.
I started down the muddy bank, sliding on my backside once or twice but not falling flat on my face, which is always a plus. As I approached them, Auntie Eileen and one of the white ones that might have been Auntie Jess, both crouched down to the ground. I grabbed them quickly as if you don’t get them first time, they seem to lose ‘the mood’.
“OK, I’ve got two of them,” I shouted up to Lorna, as I tried to make my way back up the slippery slope with a chicken under each arm. “Here you go, you throw them over the fence and I’ll go back and get the others.”
I turned around and they were gone! So I slid back down the bank figuring they couldn’t have got far and spotted them further down the river. These two were less co-operative and scurried off, further away. I gave chase, and they headed up the hill to the thick undergrowth, giving me the run-around. I looked up to see Lorna standing there, grinning. I was getting frustrated.
“Don’t just bloody stand there,” I shouted. “Do something!”
“What should I do?”
“I don’t know, the flipping things are taking the piss out of me.”
With that I picked up a couple of sticks and started waving them at the chickens. They began walking up the hill so I continued the frantic waving action, hitting the ground on either side of them to keep them going in the right direction. I had become a chicken herder. Another string to add to my bow. Just as I reached the top of the bank, Miguel drove around the corner, slowed down to a halt and just sat in his car, shaking his head in disbelief. He let us pass before driving off laughing. We got the chickens back in and they all ran to greet each other, their fat bottoms wobbling merrily.
I think I have become somewhat of a local oddity as I have been caught out before, walking with an alpaca on a halter being followed by a chicken and two cats, like some kind of modern-day Pied Piper.
The following day, I went out to open the gates. I was going to drive to town to pick up some shopping but was confronted by Rafa and Galaxy casually munching on the vegetation along our fence line. In a slight panic, in case a car came or they made a run for it, I quickly grabbed some food and tempted them back in. After a quick walk along the fence, I was unable to see where an alpaca would be able to squeeze out so I headed into town.
On my return, once again Galaxy was outside the fence eating the greenery. I slowed right down so as not to scare him, ran and opened the gate and again coaxed him back in. This time I took action. I sectioned off a portion of the paddock by closing a gate, and then went around the outside of the boundary line, making sure the chain-link fencing was attached properly to the ground posts. After leaving the field ‘secure’ and setting the boys up with plenty of hay to take their minds off their escape route, I left them to it expecting that to be the end of the matter.
Later that day, I went to give them their daily feed, and noticed that Galaxy was in a small fenced-off area where our septic tank is buried. We sometimes open this up to let them graze but at the moment it was barren. To get in there he must have jumped a small dry stone wall we built a few years before, gone under a two-bar gate with wire fencing on it, then under another piece of fencing. Alpacas don’t challenge fences? My foot! One of the things we had been told during our research was that if there is a reasonable barrier or fence, an alpaca will not try to get past that fence. But we have seen amazing acts of defiance from our boys.
Galaxy was perturbed and could not work out how to get back in to get to his dinner. So I went down to the easiest place to unhook the fencing, but before I could get it undone, he slithered (and there is no other word for it) under the chain-link and once again he was outside. Stressing and shouting, I ran around to the front to get him back in, and then had to close off the vulnerable area using additional fencing material to make sure none of the alpacas could escape until we were able to buy pegs to reinforce the bottom of the fences. Animals, arrrggghhh!
“She made me do it!”
“No, SHE made me do it!”
“Stop it, both of you! The man wasn’t happy with any of us. Did you see him try and hit us with the stick?”
“It was fun though!”
“Yeah, I like it down by the river, can we go again tomorrow?”
“I don’t think we should, he gets angry.”
“We can go in the barn and undo his hay bales.”
“Or go and torment the dogs, that’s always fun.”
“I think I’m going to stay in and sit on some eggs.”
“Oh that’s good, you can sit on all of them for us.”
“Here he comes now with our dinner, let’s all go and peck his legs”
“Come on then, let’s go.”
“I want some grain. I want some grain”
“Get out of the way, I’m jumping now!”
“I’m staying here to eat the alpaca food, they shut us in when they feed us.”
“OK, I’ll stay with you.”
“Oh no, the others have gone, quick run! We don’t want to be separated.”
Aunties Eileen, Jean, Marge, Jess, Mabel and Nanny Audrey
(Sadly Beyonce and JLo are no longer with us)
Chapter 23
After Drought, Cometh the Rain
After the winter when the bridge washed away and we were stranded, the local townhall workers came and fixed it and also laid concrete on a large section of our track to help it hold up in the bad weather. But from that moment on, the sun came out and didn’t go away for over 18 months. We did have the odd rainy day, but nothing to cause a problem and certainly not enough to give the olive farmers a good harvest. Everything had turned to dust; the land was parched and the olive trees were bare. October and November are normally buzzing around Montoro with farmers harvesting their olives but, during the drought, there were no olives to pick and it resembled a ghost town.
It was in the second summer of the drought that I endured the hottest weather I have ever experienced in my life. Towards the end of July, we were looking at the weather forecast online (an English habit) and I noticed something odd. There was a phrase I hadn’t seen before: Ola de calor, which means ‘heat wave’ in Spanish. The forecast temperatures were in the 50s.
I said to Lorna, “I don’t like the look of this, the forecast says to expect a heat wave at the end of the week, temperatures in the 50s.”
“Oh no,” she replied. “We’ve got Lee and Rick coming.”
So that was that; we kind of put it to the back of our minds and Lee and Rick arrived to stay for a couple of days. Lee is an ex-dancer of Lorna’s so there was a lot to catch up on with him and his life.
“Lorna,” Lee whispered on the first evening of their visit, “please feel free to say no, but Rick and I really prefer to swim au naturel. Would that be OK?”
Lorna was a little taken a
back, but managed to keep it together sufficiently to assure him it would not be a problem.
On the last night of their visit, he came to us and said, “We really like it here, would you mind if we stayed just one more night? We’ll do some work for you. What needs doing?”
“Well, we’ve got these piles of gravel that need raking and spreading out, you could do that for us.”
“No problem,” Lee said. “Consider it done.”
The next day came, and the predicted heat wave hit. Boy was it hot! Our only thermometer exploded in the heat so we couldn’t record the temperature, although the highest we saw, according to the car display, was 55 degrees. People were posting pictures in Montoro of thermometers hitting 58, and even 60 in Cordoba. I didn’t know what to do with myself but Lee and Rick completed the raking that they had promised to do. They did, however, do it naked! Although Lorna wasn’t shy about being around if they were using the pool naked, she tactfully suggested I avoid the area as it may make me feel a little awkward.
Over the course of a long, hot summer, you tend to forget that rain even exists. By the time September draws around and storms start to form in the sky, we have to remember to bring cushions in from outside and cover up anything mechanical. October is normally the month when most of the year’s rain falls.
This particular October, the rain had set in for a couple of days and our little stream was restored, gradually mutating into a small river. And then a larger river. As normal, when the rain is falling and we have no, or very little, solar, we spend a long time observing the rain flowing down the hills cascading into the stream. On this particular day, the river was rising and Miguel’s track was starting to get waterlogged. I popped out quickly to check the animals and get back in without getting soaked to the skin. On my return, I looked out again, and Miguel’s car had appeared at the entrance to his finca. I recognised it as his car but there was no sign of Miguel. He must have parked there unable to drive up his track, and walked up through the water.