Two very wild and reluctant suri visitors came to be shorn with ours. The second picture is a closer look at a suri fleece – two years of growth and on the hoof, but you can see how suris have dreadlocks. These alpacas live up the Indigo Valley. The fire was roaring up the valley towards them, but a wind change parted the fire and saved the property.
Jj is for Jottings 15. A Little Adventure.
On Sunday 20th December 2015, Barnawartha became a weeny bit famous for the bushfire we could have all done without. (My cousin even heard about it in Los Angeles.) With the fire having started just down the road we had to make preparations to evacuate – setting up the fire pump in the pond and leaving a note on the front gate to say where it was; wetting down the house, eaves, bushes etc.; setting up hoses; turning on the watering system; packing up the cats and the dog, valuables, photos, important papers, and so on. The best we could do for the alpacas was to open the gate into the orchard where they would be surrounded by deciduous trees and two water tanks which would melt and dump their water. They also had the fire pump and the 50,000 litre pond next to the orchard on the side that the fire would most likely approach. And then we had to drive away and leave them…..
Several hours later it began to rain and we deemed it safe to return home from Albury where we’d been with friends. Given that we were lucky enough to have home and property intact from the fire, on the way home I began to wonder how much of the orchard would be left after marauding alpaca mouths had been chomping at it for several hours. After unloading the cats and dog I rushed out to feed the chooks and see if there were any leaves left on the fruit trees. It was gloomy and raining as I cast my eye over the trees – all looked fine. The alpacas were lying down in the shed in the back paddock, right beside the open gate, so I gave them some hay and told them how good they were to leave the orchard alone. The next morning when I went to give them their breakfast I noticed a rose branch in the orchard that was out of place and, looking much more closely than the night before, I discovered great chunks of leaves missing out of several trees and a huge hole in the rose. This is what I think really happened: they were having a right old party in the orchard, heard us coming home and one of them said, “Quick, Mum’s coming! Get into the shed, lie down and look innocent and, if possible, hungry.”
Spare a thought with us for those who lost their homes and their animals, and for the animals themselves, both wild and domesticated, which lost their lives in this fire or in any other fire