Musk oxen prepare for Mother’s Day debut

PALMER — You might know this already, but musk oxen produce very soft wool called qiviut.

What you might not know is exactly how laborious the process is of obtaining qiviut.

“It’s somewhere between a cowboy and a hairdresser,” Gunnar Babcock said Thursday morning shortly after taking his turn steadily combing a musk ox with a metal hair pick.

The combing process takes an hour or more, and that doesn’t count the time it takes to corral the animal out in the field.

“It’s pretty time-consuming,” Babcock said. He’d just taken a break and handed over combing to Janelle Curtis, who admits she’s not quite as expert a hand as Babcock.

“This is my first year of combing. It’s a fine art,” she said.

By 9 a.m., the ox — a bull named Storm — had been released back into the field. As he trots by Babcock takes stock of him. The morning’s work, he surmises, has removed about half of the animal’s qiviut.

In a sense, the qiviut is the reason the farm exists. The Musk Ox Farm was founded by anthropologist John J. Teal in an attempt to create an agricultural industry uniquely suited to Alaska and exportable to all of its vast reaches. The idea is to raise musk ox for the qiviut, which can then be exported and used to make sweaters and hats and other products.

Instead of relying on cows and goats, animals better suited to the Mediterranean, Alaskans would rely on the hardy musk ox, which nature designed to live in Alaska’s sometimes inhospitable climate.

But there’s a small hitch. These oxen aren’t domesticated.

“Depending on who you talk to it takes 500 years to domesticate a given animal,” Babcock said.

While the farm does sell the qiviut it harvests to the Oomingmak cooperative in Anchorage, it is in this sense that the wool is not the reason the farm exists. At least not yet. For now, Babcock said, the farm is in the domestication business.

Domestication means a lot of things, but mostly it means breeding animals for desired characteristics. In the case of the oxen, those characteristics include a certain docility. The most chill bulls are the ones Babcock wants to see pass their genes on.

That the breeding program is continuing apace is amply visible at the farm right now, where 10 baby oxen scamper through the field. It was a good year for the oxen, Babcock said, as 11 babies were born and none with any major problems. One is now residing at the Alaska Zoo.

Calving time is a busy time for the farm. Pregnant cows have to be checked every four hours, Babcock said. It’s crucial that the babies receive antibiotics within four hours of their birth to protect them from E. coli and other diseases. It’s also a crucial time for the herd’s social structure, so the farm workers try to pick the right time to administer the medicine.

“Mom and calf have to form a bond,” Babcock said. “Musk ox will reject a calf at the drop of a hat.”

Rejected calves have to be bottle-fed, which is as labor-intensive — if not more so — than caring for a newborn child. Calves have to be fed hourly.

“I bottle fed Storm,” Babcock said. “Storm and I have a special relationship like that.”

Considering that calves are born at about the same time the animals start to shed, the assessment of the farm’s workload should probably ratchet up from “busy” to “crazy busy.”

It’s also, of course, the start of tourist season. Visitors are another key component of the farm’s funding. Mother’s Day is generally when they open their gates and this year is no exception. Sunday’s event promises live music, food and ice cream, as well as the public debut of the baby musk oxen.

If you go, you might catch Babcock there. With a few seasons under his belt, he’d be a good person to ask if you have any questions about the animals, probably one of the better people in the state.

“There’s so few people in it that you acquire a little bit of knowledge and all of a sudden you’re the most knowledgeable person around,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.