Episode 6: What Guanaco Births Taught Us About Waiting

I think of it like this:

On any given day, every one of us is waiting for something. And, I don’t know anyone who likes to wait. Also, everyone copes with waiting differently. And get this, Whether you stare or pace or plan or whatever you do, it’s impossible to end waiting. See, when one wait is over, you are just going to move on to the next wait. So, maybe rather than trying to end the wait or beat ourselves up for being impatient with the wait, we should try to think of it as a normal, everyday occurrence… and then sometimes we can celebrate the kind of waiting that brings a baby guanaco into the world.

You guessed it, this episode is about waiting. And checking. And wondering. And preparing.

And then celebrating what we waited for– guanaco babies! Which by the way, are called chulengas. First, We are going to talk about the waiting, and you might find that you just can’t wait any longer. But don’t worry, we are going to share with you the sounds of a guanaco birth and all the exciting parts of welcoming a chulenga into the world. Which, in the end, may help you see waiting as a normal part of life, in this case, a whole new life.

“Where are you on the continuum with patience and guanaco birth?” Lisa asked

“I think I’m pretty patient with guanacos,” Greg said.

“Okay, I don’t think I’m very patient,” Lisa said.

“I think you get antsy,” Greg said.

“I spend, I can’t even estimate, probably an unhealthy amount of time staring at the pregnant mama’s belly,” Lisa said.

“You do, you really do,” Greg said.

“How much time do you think you spend staring?” Lisa asked

“Well, I would say, maybe, somewhere between about a hundredth of the amount of time you do. I’m just sort of glancing at it to see if she’s having contractions. Or if the baby is particularly active. You spend a lot of time, just intently staring,” Greg said.

He’s right, I get impatient and to deal with the impatience, I end up watching for movement in the mama’s belly. It’s quick when the movement happens, so I could miss it if I look away for even a moment.

Greg has a different approach to waiting.

“Mine is to plan. It’s to make sure I have everything I’m going to need. To imagine how it’s going to happen and if I think I need something from the store, I have to go get it,” Greg said.

“You have to get stuff,” Lisa said.

“I have to go get stuff, I have brought it here,” Greg said.

“Stuff gathering,” Lisa said.

“I have to check and make sure I have surgical gloves and if I don’t I have to go get them. And I have to check again and make sure I have enough surgical gloves,” Greg said.

“Just in case you need another box,” Lisa said.

“I just need to check and make sure I have a syringe to get the mucus out if that is necessary,” Greg said.

“Double check,” Lisa said.

“And check again, right. I have to make sure I know where it is and that under any scenario that I can imagine, I have enough stuff to get the job done,” Greg said.

So Greg gathers stuff. I stare. We have Different approaches, same waiting.

“I mean, I guess we could say that our different styles of waiting complement each other. Because I rely on you to gather the stuff,” Lisa said.

“Thank you, I know that,” Greg said.

“And you have asked me, did you see anything today,” Lisa said.

“Well, I do, and I”m interested in whether you have or not. I’m also feeling like I need to distract you a little from all your staring,” Greg said.

“Oh, I don’t know why it’s such a big deal for me, but that’s just how it is,” Lisa said.

“It can be,” Greg said.

Okay, so my checking goes on for a long time. And unfortunately, our waiting window is a fairly broad span of time.

“So what about the problem we have, that we don’t really know when our females conceived. The ones we bred, we have an approximate,” Lisa said.

“Right, and of course, they’re never going to be spot on in terms of the delivery date either.
It’s just like any pregnancy, the babies come when it’s their time, not when the calendar says,” Greg said.

“The best estimate we have right now is 345-355 days of gestation. That’s the best estimate we have. But we don’t exactly know, even though we know when they were bred, we don’t exactly know when they conceived,” Greg said.

“Right because they are bred over basically, a 12 day, 10 day time period?” Lisa asked.

“Yeah, 12 day time period,” Greg said.

“And then it could have been conceived early in that time period or late in that time period.
And then we also don’t verify pregnancy other than the spit test,” Lisa said.

“Which is of questionable accuracy. Right, that’s all we do. Whether the female is interested in fighting the male or just breeding with him. And that’s what we use to determine whether she’s pregnant at that point or not,” Greg said.

For the first birth on our farm, we asked our friend, Monty Hunter, to video the birth. He’s a retired videographer who lives close by. And it turns out that he had his own style of waiting.

“When I agreed to do that I was very excited, and of course, I had no idea when it was going to happen. But I was kind of treating it as if I was a volunteer fireman. I had my gear all lined up, not at the door, but to go quickly, and if I didn’t hear anything for a few days, I’d check in with you, “no, no” not yet. As time wore on, nothing was happening, you’d say, not today,” Monty said.

“Did you ever think it wasn’t going to happen?” Lisa asked

“No, but I’d forget about it,” Monty said.

From the volunteer fireman approach of waiting to forgetting about it. Monty had his own waiting style. I was doing my checking, Greg was doing his gathering, and Monty was texting for updates when he remembered. There were hundreds of others involved online who were guessing the day and time of our chulengos arrival. In all, it was quite the waiting party.

And, when the day finally came. It was quite a day!

“Good girl, good job my girl.,” Lisa said. “Oh my God.” It’s a girl I think.

“It was fast, I finished cleaning the barn and then I went to go get some food because I thought, “this is going to be a long day, she’s gonna labor for a really long time because that’s what our former experience was. It was a half-day to a six-hour-ish ordeal. So I wanted to get food and then I came out and there was a head sticking out! You know? And, I don’t even remember where you were, but I’m sure I was screaming–the heads out, the heads out.” Lisa said.

“I think I was in the barn trying to check and see if we had everything,” Greg said.

“You were still looking for stuff,” Lisa said.

“Still looking for stuff. Do I have the towels? Do I have this in case you need it? Do I have that? Iodine? Betadine?” Greg said.

“Right,” Lisa said.

“Do I have rubber gloves, surgical gloves?” Greg asked.

“All the stuff,” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg said.

“I was there to at least video the head and the whole poor little thing hanging and plopping down to the ground. And all the aunties checking it out. It’s so cute. It’s a herd ordeal. It’s not just like this mama has to go give birth by herself and come back and show her babies to the other mamas in the herd,” Lisa said.

“Right, they all have to sniff it,” Greg said.

“Even when it’s not out yet,” Lisa said.

Now, since Season One of this podcast is about what we’ve learned about raising guanacos, the first birth on our farm was another learning opportunity.

And, like so many other things, we got this one wrong. We didn’t know what to do during the first moments of a baby guanaco’s life. I had attended a birth at Paige’s ranch (we talked about her in episode 2), and so we were only going by that experience. But even so, it makes for a very dramatic birth story.

“At that time, we were under the impression that,” Lisa said.

“Again, bad instructions,” Greg said.

“The baby gets born and then you have to bring it into the barn,” Lisa said.

“Right, dry it off, put iodine on its umbilical cord, check its mouth and nose to make sure that there’s no mucus in there. And then get it into a covered area,” Greg said.

To keep it warm and for mom and baby to bond,” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg said.

“Okay so that was our good intentions,” Lisa said.

“Good intentions, wrong idea,” Greg said.

“You were done rushing around, you had the towel,” Lisa said.

“I had the towel, we dried it off,” Greg said.

“We didn’t get a chance to dry it all the way off because we found that our girl Georgia was not going to let us interact with her baby,” Lisa said.

“She was not liking our presence with her baby,” Greg said.

“and sort of biting and spitting,” Lisa said.

“Yes,” Greg said.

“So I think we decided not to dry the baby off in the pasture, to try to get the baby separated, we’re so dumb! The idea was, this baby needs drying off, and it needs a coat on it cause it’s gonna get too cold. That means we need to separate the baby from its mama,” Lisa said.

“Well, we need to get the baby into the barn and then mom will come into the barn,” Greg said.
“And if she was going to fight us we needed to have access to this little boy to do all the stuff we needed to do without mama attacking us,” Lisa said.

“I grabbed ahold of Georgia and you grabbed ahold of the baby and you started trotting into the barn with the baby in your arms. Georgia is distressed at this point,” Greg said.

“It was terrible,” Lisa said.

“It was terrible,” Greg said.

“I was terrified,” Lisa said.

“And she was trying to catch you to knock you down with the baby in your arms. And I had ahold of her with my feet dug in and she was dragging me behind her, beside her,” Greg said.

“And you were like, “run, run,” Lisa said.

“Go faster, go faster cause I can’t hold her,” Greg said.

“I thought I had precious cargo so I was trying to be gentle. I didn’t want to, you know, don’t shake the baby!” Lisa said.

“It was completely lame,” Greg said.

“It was dramatic and lame. The good thing was that nobody got attacked,” Lisa said.

“The good thing was that we did get the coat on. He was so light and his neck was like a noodle, it was weird and long and giraffey… and he couldn’t stand up, so that when, how do you put a baby down, I sort of plunked him. And you said something like, “Don’t drop him,” Lisa said.

Monty’s video captured the next several hours. It’s a treasure to listen and relisten to these tense moments.

“That’s your baby Georgia, see. He’s doing good ha,” Lisa said.

“What I remember is him trying to nurse the feeders because he kept mistaking the feeders on the wall for his mom,” Greg said.

“it’s the perfect slope,” Lisa said.

“and trying to find the nipple underneath them which wasn’t there. And it was hours, it was 3-4 hours of us trying–oh we’re going to have to give him a bottle. And at the end of that, mom led him outside of the barn, into the sunlight where he could see her and he started nursing.” Greg said.

“We just made it much worse than we needed to,” Greg said.

“We did,” Lisa said.

“The troughs are at an angle, they’re sort of triangular-shaped, just like a mama’s belly would be. And so it was perfect, and it looked exactly like it should look for this little baby and he kept bonking his head into it and she was all worried. And making noises,” Lisa said.

“They can’t see that well when they are born,” Greg said.

“No, they’re just looking for shadows,” Lisa said.

“And so he kept going into corners and getting stuck. And oh, it was awful,” Greg said.

It was quite a day, no matter how much planning, how much gathering, how much waiting, we didn’t anticipate that our new little guy would keep getting stuck in corners.

And that it would be so difficult and stressful to help.

“Georgia, I have to do this honey. Go ahead Lisa, it’s okay, we’re helping,” Greg said.

“Yeah, and if he would get stuck in the corner, then you would have to hold Georgia back while I went and fetched him out of the corner. So there was a slot between the trough and the wall that he kept thinking was a good place to go. And he’d fall down in there and there was no way he was going to back himself out because he wasn’t strong enough. And so I’d have to go pull him out. And you were holding Georgia off again so she wouldn’t attack. That was a very dramatic day,” Lisa said.

“Do you remember the moment when you were trying to steer him toward her or something, and she came toward you and you were bent over trying to steer him and she bit your hat off,” Lisa said.

“I’m helping, I’m helping… sounds of her spitting, you got it, you killed it,” Greg said.

“My hat off my head onto the ground, and then spit on it,” Greg said.

“And stomped on it,” Lisa said.

“She was killing my knit hat,” Greg said.

“She was like, I don’t like you, I’m going to do your hat instead,” Lisa said.

“I’m gonna show you just how angry I am and I’m going to take it all out of your hat,” Greg said.

“That was very intense,” Lisa said.

So we named that little guy Andes. And he did end up latching on and nursing and everyone was so happy and relieved.

“She’s very good…,” Lisa said.

So, that was one event that we’d waited and waited for. Once it happened, I was happy and relieved. But, remember–we are always waiting for something. And the next something was another baby—or so we thought!

“We had that baby, Andes, and then we went back to waiting, remember?” Lisa asked

“Waiting for Angies’ baby who you with good reason, swore she was pregnant. We both thought she was pregnant,” Greg said.

“I documented kicks. And I was sure she was, her milk was coming in, and I took pictures and tracked the expansion of her girth,” Lisa said.

“We were feeding her a lot because we thought she was pregnant,” Greg said.

“With lactation pellets,” Lisa said.

“Lots of them,” Greg said.

“She really liked lactation pellets,” Lisa said.

“She sure did. She put on a lot of pounds with lactation pellets,” Greg said.

“It was, maybe it’s this week, maybe no, maybe it’s this week, no,” Lisa said.

“And in our defense, she did breed with Coacher 8 or 10 times that year, and gosh, how could she not be pregnant? Well, she just liked to breed with Coacher,” Greg said.

So at some point during the waiting, we finally decided she was not pregnant.

“It was hard to give up. I was like, Okay. It’s way too long,” Lisa said.

“Yeah, it’s like 13 months,” Greg said.

“She’s not going to have a baby. And then I found myself staring at her again, “Are you sure you’re not having a baby?” Lisa said.

“I’m sure all those kicks were all those lactation pellets moving around in her rumen. And causing it to have all these over-rich contractions to get it digested,” Greg said.

“So, the wait for Angie’s baby ended, and then, you guessed it… we went back to waiting,” Lisa said?

“So then there was the next year of waiting,” Lisa said.

“Well, there was the next year of not knowing who was pregnant because we didn’t, again, bad choice, bad information, didn’t allow them to breed enough. So Angie bred with Coacher, I think three times that year. Which was one more than the two other girls did. They ended up not being pregnant and we didn’t know about Angie. We thought maybe she was sterile and couldn’t conceive,” Greg said.

“Right because she had just been fat last time. And she should have been pregnant,” Lisa said.

“So I was a little bit less anxious. This time around. But I did have that same thing–waking up in the morning. Is this going to be the day? Is this going to be the day?” Greg asked.

“Well and you videoed kicks and,” Greg said.

“At that point, it was unmistakable that there was something in there kicking very strongly.

And when you capture it on video, you know you didn’t make it up in your mind. You can watch it over and over again and make sure,”

So the baby watch went on. This time we were sure that we were going to greet a new chulenga soon, but we didn’t know when.

“I remember going out in the morning to the barn and Angie was making noises, I thought she was hungry, doing her little, mmmmm, mmmm,” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg said.

“And so we just left it at that, right?” Lisa said.

“I didn’t make much of it. If you weren’t all excited like this is the day, then I just figured it wasn’t the day,” Greg said.

“So I actually went swimming, and was all like, it’s not happening today,” Lisa said.

“And I was outside doing chores or something,” Greg said.

“And I came back and sat down to eat my lunch and I was just going to check on the pasture and they were all bunched together looking at something in the pasture. And I didn’t take one bite of my salad and yelled, “We have a baby on the ground,” Lisa said.

“And I went running over to see and I went, yes, there was a wet little baby,” Greg said.

“He had just been born, can you believe the timing? That was pretty good timing. But we didn’t even get to see it poking out,” Lisa said.

“No, Angie’s a big strong girl and it was all over,” Greg said.

“She just did it,” Lisa said.

“So we went out there. And it was a girl,” Lisa said.

“It was a girl…” Greg said.

“And it was just so exciting,” Lisa said.

“We dried its head and neck off a little but not very much, put iodine on the umbilical cord, again, as quickly as possible,” Greg said.

“All in the pasture,” Lisa said.

“And backed away,” Greg said.

“And then the most touching thing was a few minutes later I was cleaning up the placenta with a garbage bag and she stumbled up to me on her weak little bony legs and put her nose right in my face to sniff me cause my head was down near her head,” Greg said.

“We have a picture of that,” Greg said.

“It’s so precious,” Lisa said.

“It is so darling,” Greg said.

“That interaction of not knowing anything about you, you were a part of the world that she was exploring. There was no instinct that I should be wary of this life form. It was just, oh you are here too. So sweet,” Lisa said.

“I was so surprised,” Greg said.

“That was adorable,” Lisa said.

“I was so surprised. It was like I wanted to give her the biggest kiss,” Greg said

“I know, well, you wanna hug and pet and all of that,” Lisa said.

“From that day forward she has been so sweet,” Greg said.

Now, we are at the current day. It’s the middle of February 2022, three and a half years into this guanaco fiber farm project, two births later. And guess what, We are doing the same waiting!

“We are waiting again!” Lisa said.

“We are,” Greg said.

“You say that with this low, ugh,” Lisa said.

“Well, part of it because of Bebo who we are waiting for we have bad dates about when she was bred,” Greg said.

“Well, we don’t have any idea. We do have a blood test,” Lisa said.

“We have a blood test because she had to have a blood test to come here, so we have that, that said she was pregnant. And, we don’t know when. We know she’s fat. We know that she was extremely thin when she came here. And she put on weight in a real hurry. Because she’d been deprived of adequate nutrition,” Greg said.

“And I’ve seen kicks, maybe,” Lisa said.

“And you’ve seen kicks, maybe. And she’s setting a record for being grouchy with her pregnancy,” Greg said.

“Yeah, pregnancy does not compliment her at all,” Lisa said.

“She’s so grumpy and not just with us. With picking fights with the other animals. It doesn’t matter that they beat her up,” Greg said.

“And we also have the spit test which was actually a fight, she wouldn’t breed with Coacher.

For our working knowledge, she is probably pregnant. And probably due now or,” Lisa said.

“Later,” Greg said.

“And we are back, is today going to be the day? And I’m back to staring,” Lisa said.

“And I try to come and say hi to her every morning and get a sense, is this the day, are you in labor?” Greg asked.
“And yesterday, I saw a flutter and then you saw something, without me even telling you, you saw something,” Lisa said.

“Right, it was low in her stomach, it was not where her rumen is,” Greg said.

“So how do you feel about waiting on Bebo’s birth,” Lisa said.

“I’m feeling okay about it now, what I’m most anticipating is whether her grumpiness will subside with the birth,” Greg said.

“If she doesn’t have a baby, we probably have a personality problem on our hands,” Lisa said.

“If she does have her baby, we don’t know, it could be another month,” Greg said.

“Right,” Lisa said. “Of waiting.”

“It could easily be another month,” Greg said.

“And worrying and anticipating and wondering and checking,” Lisa said.

“Yeah, all of that,” Greg said.

“But the day that it happens, it could be a very good day,” Lisa said.

“Yes, it could be, I’m hoping for easy labor for her and a healthy baby,’ Greg said.

“I can’t wait to see a new baby,” Lisa said.

The clock keeps ticking.

“Okay girl, is that a kick?” Lisa said. “Do you have a baby there or not?”

So I guess what I realize now, is that waiting is an endless revolving state. Or maybe it’s a tide–it just comes in and out. Whatever it is, I have made better friends by waiting. I like to just think of waiting as something we are always doing, like breathing or swallowing. And in that sense, because it is inevitable, it doesn’t have to be so unpleasant. So now, when I’m waiting on baby guanacos, I wake up every day and say, “Yay, I have to wait again today!” Because if I had to choose what I’m waiting for, I’d rather wait for a baby than anything else.

We’re curious, if you have to wait because it’s just a part of normal life, what do you most like waiting for? And how do you do it? What’s your style?

Tune in next time when we share the story of how losing one of our beloved guanacos brought us closer together and how we found the answer to the question, “How can we keep doing this?”

Credits:

I want to thank Monty Hunter not just for his video of Andes’ birth, but for all of the other videos he’s made for us. It’s super cool to have this kind of artful record of our farm life. You can see his work on our website afiberlife.com on the About page.

And I also want to give a shout-out to Bright Sighted Podcasting. Steve is doing what I’ve now learned is called mixing. And he’s doing an amazing job, wouldn’t you agree. And Christine is at the helm–guiding production with her editing and artwork. She’s talented, but she also gets it–which is more than I could dream of.