Saturday 8 March 2014

Okutala: parrots, horses & goats!


Surprisingly one of the animals that I bonded most with here at Okutala were 2 of the macaw parrots. The aviary was pretty small for the number of birds in it but it was a temporary one and there are actually 2 massive ones being built with in the next couple months. I’m not sure what it was about the 2 macaws but they loved sitting on my shoulders and my head. Lol I think my Tilley hat did fascinate them. They were pretty entertaining birds even if one tried to take my finger nail off! Ouch! 
The horses were pretty cool too. They are a bit of a mixed herd of 2 stallions (buckskin & chestnut), 2 pregnant broodmares (grey and bay), an older gelding, 2 -2 yrs cremellos, yearling cremello and a foal.  They only arrived last month. No one really knows how much training they have but most of them are pretty friendly. We did spend a couple hours deworming them. The big buckskin stallion is probably the friendliest one of the bunch and definitely use to getting his way, bit spoiled. I had to laugh at him because he is so food motivated that Livia managed to distract him by walking around feeding him one pellet of grain at a time while we fed/dewormed the others. I was actually offered a “job” ( working to cover food and bed) working with the horses. But ended up turning it down since I wasn’t planning on being in Namibia for much longer. And the risk of getting hurt and still having lots of traveling left to do. Would have been fun to do though. 

I do have to quickly mention the goats since I know Keiko is reading this. :D The herd of 23 goats that Okutala owns and are milked to use for cheese. The guests walk them out to their daytime paddock and then get the joyous task of finding them and bringing them back in ,in the afternoon. Bringing them in was sometimes a bit of a long hot task trying to find them in the bushes. Specially if you go out with a few people and someone else finds them and you can’t hear the other person yelling to say that they have been found. Pretty cute but not the friendliest goats.

And while I was there, another smaller herd of goats had been found on the property so they were rounded up and kept with the horses til the owners were tracked down. PJ adored the big billy goat who he named Baloo  and was heart broken when the goats went home. He blamed me for not keeping Baloo for him. 

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