YORK — Rat, Delilah and Iris have an exciting summer ahead of them.
During the day, they get to meet new friends on their farm and splash in their kiddie pool. And when it gets too hot, they take field trips to York’s Short Sands Beach to spend the evening with the salty wind in their ear fluff and all eight toes in the sand.
The small herd of alpacas belongs to Crocketts Brook Farm in Kittery Point. Lately, they’ve gained a lot of attention after a beachgoer posted a video of the ladies splashing in the water online.
“They just seem to make people happy,” said Kim Icovitti, one of the herd’s owners . “When people see them, they’re like, ‘What are we looking at?’ They’re funny-looking animals.”
Icovetti and Laura Nutbrown — her friend and co-alpaca owner — are both former library employees at Exeter High School in New Hampshire. Neither has any farm experience, nor do their families.
But after Icovetti heard a story on NPR about alpacas in Maine three years ago, she became curious about getting her own. She had been looking for a new adventure, and the alpacas came at the perfect time.
“I said to my husband, ‘Is that something you think we could do?’” To her surprise, he said yes.
Then, she dove into the research: How much does an alpaca cost? How do you take care of them?
When Icovetti asked Nutbrown if she wanted in on the action, she said, “Absolutely.”
Now, with the help of family friends Kristen “KJ” Fuller and Micayla Gilligan, the two women run Crocketts Brook Farm.
They split ownership of six alpacas: their original three — Rat (short for Ratatouille), Iris and Delilah — plus Betty, Symphony and Patti, who aren’t yet trained for beach trips.
Icovetti and Nutbrown’s original plan was to allow visitors to meet the alpacas and cut their own flowers. Then, they started toying with hosting English teas, alpaca yoga, birthday parties and other camelid-centered events. After a few successful yoga sessions and tea parties, they ran into a road block: They were losing traction.
“Where do you advertise for something like that?” Icovitti said.
Their solution? Take the alpacas to the beach.
The crew learned after their first visit to Short Sands Beach that York has an ordinance banning animals from visiting before 6 p.m.
Another local rule limits beach visits for horses and ponies to between May and September. But there are no rules specific to alpacas.
Fuller said the beach trips are great enrichment for the animals and help them cool off on hot days. Icovetti and Nutbrown added that they also are an opportunity to promote Crocketts Brook Farm and their new alpaca-based business venture, Salty Herd.
Salty Herd was born after the team received positive feedback to its alpaca products during a pop-up at a tree festival, Icovitti said.
“People were telling us, ‘I wish there was somewhere closer by where we could buy this alpaca clothing and socks,’” she said.
Rat, Iris and Delilah are the poster-alpacas for the company, which will officially open in early July, but the team is hoping the others will be able to join soon.
Spit Happens
The alpacas enjoy their field trips, but sometimes getting them there is a struggle, Gilligan said.
The process starts with the team gently corralling the alpacas into an area where they can be leashed up. Getting the herd into a confined space is key because, as it turns out, it’s very hard to catch an alpaca on the loose, Fuller said.
“Sometimes Delilah screams and she sounds like an actual child,” she warned as she slipped a red halter onto the alpaca’s head on a sunny Tuesday evening.
After some coaxing to ditch the rest of the herd, a grueling five minutes of refusing to leave the pen, a brief seat in the dirt and an attempt to usher them out by squirting them with a hose, Delilah, Iris and Rat were in the back of a trailer and on their way to the beach.
Nutbrown and Icovitti, recalling their time together working at Exeter High, joked that there’s not much of a difference between owning alpacas and controlling a room full of high school students.
“Usually it isn’t this hard,” Nutbrown laughed. She had a theory about why that night was so difficult: The last time the herd was in a trailer, their winter coats were shaved, so they might have thought they were getting shorn again.
Luckily for them, what followed was a few hours of making people smile on the beach.
When the crew hits the sand, the humans sport T-shirts with the Salty Herd logo, plus some safety warnings on the back: “Spit happens, we might kick, don’t pat our heads and be calm and respectful.”
Spit does happen, but the alpaca wranglers like to remind timid visitors that, unlike llamas, alpacas only spit at each other. They’re also less aggressive and much smaller than their cousins, making them the ideal option for a frolic on the beach.
On Tuesday, some people sprinted from the other end of the quarter-mile shore to pet the alpacas’ skinny necks. Others said they’d seen them online, or that they thought they were seeing extraordinarily tall dogs from afar.
Most think they’re llamas upon first glance. But to the team at Salty Herd, it isn’t worth correcting them as long as the alpacas are spreading joy.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Isabelle Oss can be reached at ioss@metln.org