Alpaca fleece colour tips

It is raining as I type which is really rather odd as it is 9 pm, pitch black and no rain forecast. zip in fact for tonight.

Nights are still warm and plenty of sunshine hopefully ahead for the rest of August. Would we be lucky enough to get an Indian Summer after the heatwave of this one I wonder?

In a previous blog, I mentioned that the true colour of an Alpaca is at the skin. I was quizzed on this lately by someone who did not know anything about Alpaca and I realised that it is quite difficult to explain “tipping” to someone not even remotely “farmy”.. so here goes.

When an Alpaca is born, it is released from the amniotic fluid which has surrounded it as it grew inside its Mother. This stains the outside of what then becomes the Alpaca Cria (baby) fleece.

This can be a totally different colour once the fleece is opened and therefore the colour first seen by the eyes may not necessarily be the colour underneath which is its “true” colour.

Soooo, in the Alpaca world, we open the fleece up to skin level and take the colour of the fleece inside at the skin to be the Alpaca colour.

Hopefully the following photograph clearly demonstrates that the colour brown at the tip of this fleece belies the fact that the Alpaca is Black.

The super Alpaca this came from is solid black  and this was the cria fleece.