Golden Spirit Alpaca Ranch

Baby alpaca (cria) learn behaviors from their mamas - even sunbathing! Like mother, like son. Learning and replicating is why you always leave babies WITH their mamas until they are picking up on the alpaca behaviors.

May 31. Last day of May 2026 is a great day to enjoy an Alpaca Experience. Visit the website goldenspiritalpaca.com to
register for a fun Sunday!

Encore - in French means ‘again’ or ‘once more.’ The name fit because this Brilliance baby captures his unique ‘fineness’ characteristics. Each and every year fiber that is long and fine with a luscious tactile sense. What else Encore does that we can’t catch in video is to greet us with a slight lip smacking. Nose in the air as if to say ‘ i’m here, notice me, kiss kiss kiss.’

With sea turtle nesting season taking off, beachgoers are likely to see many crawls here in Brevard County, Florida without the yellow sea turtle signs. There is no need to worry! Unmarked nests are well-protected from the mother turtles’ efforts to cover the eggs with a well-packed layer of sand, usually 1-2 feet deep or more!

As many of you know, the Archie Carr NWR is a special place for turtles! The beach we monitor in Brevard County has some of the highest populations of nesting loggerhead and green sea turtles in the world. We get thousands - often tens of thousands - of nests in just 13 miles of beach in southern Brevard. We cannot locate and apply signs to every single one of these nests, nor do we need to monitor nest success. We only need to mark as subset of the nests laid (only about 1-3% in south Brevard), and we do this to estimate average numbers of eggs and hatchlings per nest each year. We typically do not put barriers around marked nests during the main nesting season to keep the beach as free of obstacles and debris as possible.

It may appear that nests are vulnerable to disturbance, but these tips can help nests stay safe and hatchlings emerge naturally:

• Don’t put long stakes in the ground.
• Don’t dig giant holes on the beach - this not only poses a threat to the nests, but also to you, other beachgoers, and nesting turtles.
• Do not purposely dig into any sea turtle nests at any stage in incubation.
• If you do witness a hatchling emergence, it’s important to let the hatchlings crawl to the water themselves and not stand in front of them. Just stand back and enjoy!

We know how much our community adores our sea turtles, and our team is working tirelessly to monitor local nesting. With your help, we can do our jobs more efficiently and keep nests safe!

As of today, May 15th, the UCF MTRG has recorded the following nest numbers on the Brevard County portion of the ACNWR (21 km/13 mi):

Leatherback - 41
Loggerhead - 1,916
Green turtle - 0
Kemp's ridley - 1

📸 (K. Szympruch 2025): green turtle tracks overlapping on beach

Some Friends do everything together ❣️

When you’ve been pregnant 365 days there isn’t a comfortable position