Terra firma

The wee Lutz clan landed late yesterday afternoon in Boston, along with our friends that had been with us for the past 10 or so days in the British Virgin Islands onboard our chartered sailboat. Though it’s always a bit shocking to go from 85 degrees and sunny to the heart of winter, at least this year we also had the nice visual of the recent snow — courtesy of last week’s Nor’Easter — to go along with the bone chilling 9 degrees fahrenheit we had awaiting us at Logan. Regardless, any lack of immediate enthusiasm for the local climate was more than compensated for by the knowledge that we would at least get to sleep last night in our own beds.

We did unfortunately wake up to the news today that one of our yearling females here on the farm whom had previously been found with a very low body temp and moved into the Arena’s warm room, had in the end passed away early this morning. As it turned out, while I was busy going through a back-log of emails, Jen spent the first part of the day doing a necropsy with our vet to see if they could find any answers. A fine welcome home indeed. It’s always disheartening to lose a young member of the herd, especially when there is no obvious smoking gun to be found in the immediate aftermath. It’ll be a few days before we know anything, if for that matter there is in fact anything conclusive to be found. I will say that the extreme cold that we experience here in the northern climes does set our management and husbandry a bit apart from the more temperate parts of the USA (read: we have to feed more aggressively) and it is entirely possible that all we came home to was a slightly compromised alpaca (she had gotten thin since our last herd health check in early December) taken aback by the extreme temperatures we had gone through of late here. Sometimes bad things just happen. All of that being said, it is indeed good to be back home in Vermont and the beat does most definitely go on! Stay warm everybody…

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