January 2, 2011
It's kind of funny!! This year on the Chinese calendar is the year of the Rabbit. Today I went with my female rabbit, a Red - Eyed White, named Snowflake, to visit my friend Pam's fiber farm. I brought along my daughter Charlotte, my friend Lisa, and her son Harry. Pam calls her farm, Main Street Farm, and it is right next door to Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, NH. Along with lots of larger fiber animals she also has Snowflakes full sister and another male rabbit. They are named King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. They have already had two litters of bunnies. A total of nine in all. I went there to see if I could successfully mate Snowflake to King Arthur. It failed last month. I thought that rabbits were extremely fertile. We did see evidence that something had happened (I won't go into details).
January 16, 2011
Today she would be two weeks pregnant. I have done all kinds of reading on-line about "palpating a rabbit". It is the way you're supposed to find out if your rabbit is expecting. You feel the abdomen in a certain way, you are feeling for marble shaped items (the babies). I couldn't feel anything. She has defiantly been acting a little crazy and seems very hungry when ever I get near her. She always rattles her cage and actually escaped and ate part of the foam on a hot water pipe. Seemed to have come out in the end. I have since put locks on the cage on both doors.
February 1, 2011
I came home and went downstairs to check on Snowflake. She was sitting in the new addition I had made to her home. On Sunday I put in her nesting box and filled it with hay. It took up a lot of room so I attached another cage to the front. This one had a flat floor bottom. I put the litter box in this one but she has been using the whole thing as a litter box. It needed to be cleaned, especially if she was about to give birth. It was getting late and I had to go pick up the kids at the elementary school. Shuyu to the rescue. Shuyu helped coral Snowflake while I cleaned out the bottom of her cage. One of the other kids called down for Shuyu. Her dad had come to take her to dance. Perfect timing it was clean and Snowflake was in the cage. I came upstairs and started to play Electronic Monopoly with the kids. After a few rounds I decided to go downstairs and check on Snowflake. She had a big mouthful of hay in her mouth and looked up at me. "This is promising", I thought. This is nesting behavior. She had done this the other day also, so I was getting hopeful. I went back upstairs to play with the kids. Less than a half an hour later I decided to go back down and check on her again. There she was sitting in the nesting box which she had lined with her fur. In the nest....could it be? It was! I counted eight baby bunnies. "How could she possibly have eight bunnies in her, I couldn't feel anything. Where were they hiding?" When articles you read tell you that it is hard for a beginner to palpate a rabbit, believe them. When I came upstairs, Charlotte looked at me and I smiled and held my finger to my lips. She squirmed happily in her chair, and then went to her room. When I went to see what Charlotte was doing she was crying. She didn't want anything to happen to Snowflake. I told her she looked very good. I decided to take each child down one by one for a quick peek. Charlotte felt better after seeing that Snowflake was alright. That evening, when I went back to clean up the birthing mess, Haley and Charlotte distracted Snowflake by feeding her a carrot. I put a clean blanket on the floor, and after taking out the soiled bedding I took each baby out, one by one and put them all next to each other on the blanket. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...", "there aren't eight babies", Haley said. I continued counting, "Eight, nine, ten".
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