Meet 'Flecki'

After a 20 month break I am owning rabbits again, well one rabbit, to be exact but this little beauty will be my breeding doe for next year. I had plans to get a doe in July/August which proved to be quite difficult, as it seemed like no one had s suitable doe available (doe, max 5-6 month, medium size, no giant). Two weeks ago I decided to put an ad at the door of my local animal food /garden shop (which is also the only shop in my village). I figured that people buying their rabbit food there might have one available. On Monday evening I got a call, while speaking to the woman it turns out that we have met and talked a few times at the store when I was there with the twins to drop of parcels. She had a suitable doe available and today I picked her out and up. She is a beauty and I am glad the boys will be able to grow up with some animals around. Next on the list is a suitable buck.

She is called Flecki for the time being, maybe I can come up with a better name sometime

2 weeks old

Today the litter of rabbits is two weeks old and the little ones are absolutely gorgeous. They are pretty active now but still sleep a lot. They try to nibble on the hay as well. Beauty is doing well and they are growing each day, have a look:

Daddy

1 week old

Tuesday June 8th saw Beauty's second litter being born. My first count came up with 11 (!) little babies, we will see in a few weeks if it's really that many. The babies are very cute and I am so pleased to see some red once in between all the black. They are very agile already. I am of course worried that not all will make it. 11 is a very high number of babies. Beauty is currently being fed 3 times a day, to ensure she has enough energy and is able to produce enough milk. To be honest I can spend hours sitting there and watching the little once.

3 days old

7 days old

 

proud mama

7 days old

My sweet rabbits

My sweet rabbits are growing every day. They are 16 days old now and yesterday morning it was the first time that they ventured out of their nest. Mom keeps an eye on them all the time and ensures that they go back in to stay warm. They are very cute to watch and I can spend hours just watching them...

Goodbye

the last 2 of Maya's litter

I took this picture on Monday evening and said goodbye to the last two rabbit babies from Maya's litter. Over the course of 24 hours, from Sunday evening when the first rabbit had died I was down to two rabbits by Monday evening. I could see since Saturday evening that they appeared less lively and it was heartbreaking to see them pass away one after the other. All the sleepless nights that I put in over the last week and they didn't make it. But that is live on a homestead. By Monday night those two were the only once left, they kept hanging in there but were hardly responding to the milk I tried to give them. I knew that they would not make it through the night and so I gave them a last cuddle and said good bye...


On a positive note, Beauty gave birth to a litter of 10 rabbits on Saturday morning. One of them passed away straight away and a second was dead on Sunday morning. Beauty had moved both outside the nest and she appears to be feeding the other 8. The babies are tiny and I am praying that the majority of them will make it. This morning they are 5 days old and so far everything looks ok, the critical part about not feeding them at all has passed, so now I just hope she has enough milk to bring them all through.

Beauty's litter

feeling tired

a few hours old

2 days old

4 days old

4 days old

Maya gave birth to a little of 9 little one on Friday morning. I have been worried about this litter, since she didn't feed the babies of her last litter but I wanted to give her another chance. When I checked on Saturday, she had not fed them again. To cut a long story short, the babies are now in my office and I am hand feeding them every 4 hours. I have not been this exhausted in ages. The first day and a half it was difficult to get them to drink from a bottle/syringe and it took about 1.5 - 2 hours to feed all 9 of them. But they are learning quickly where the milk is coming from, now I am averaging at around an hour to 70 minutes.  So far they are doing well, fingers crossed that this continues on. I had hopes that Mia would give birth last night and that I might be able to put 1-3 babies with her but she didn't have a litter so far and Beauty who is due on Friday is a first time mom and looks about ready to pop so, no chance to put one in with her.

Smoker

My brother has a food smoker, that we decided to try out this weekend. My brother and his friend love to go fishing and we had a few fish left in the freezer. After putting them in a mixture of salt water overnight, we started the smoker around 9am on Saturday and by 1pm  we had some lovely smoked fish. I have asked to borrow the smoker for making some sausage later on in the year.

Heartache on a homestead

Maya had a litter of 9 babies, I say had, as they have all passed away on Day 4. On Tuesday morning all of them were still fine, although I found that 5 of them were in a separate nest. After touching Maya to ensure I smell like her. I checked the 4 babies in the old nest and the 5 in the new nest and put them together in one nest. They all looked fine, if a bit on the small side but considering the size of the litter that was expected. I put them all back in the nest and covered them. I checked them as usually throughout the day and they were alright. I fed the mom and the other rabbits at 6pm as usual, nothing strange then. I checked again at 10pm when I noticed to babies looked rather starved and there was a little less movement in the nest then what I was used to. There wasn’t much I could do at 10pm and I resigned myself to the fact that I would loose those two. I also decided to pick up kitten  milk from the vet on the next day, in order to hand feed them, so as not loose more. On Wednesday morning, two babies where out side the nest, clearly dead. When I checked the nest, all the other babies were dead too and looked starved. I am beyond devastated at the moment but this is how life on a homestead works, the show must go on.

I am not 100% sure what caused the death. Little rabbit babies are only fed once a day in the early hours of the morning. Considering they died in the morning of day 4, it might be that mom forgot to feed all of them, which would confirm the timeline of passed away on day 4. Wish I would have noticed sooner, then I could have maybe saved a few of them L But they all wiggled and I didn’t want to put my hands in the nest to early. It’s another hard lesson learned.

Babies

Maya gave birth this morning to a litter. They are all covered in the nest, they are wiggling around and she is careful not to step on them. I have not checked out how many there are yet, just from observing there are at least 3 but could as easily be 5 or 6. Fingers crossed that all goes well

Praying for rabbits

See all the fur in May's box? She has started to build a nest earlier today. Her litter is due in the night. After having lost another of Mia's litters on Thursday morning, right after birth, I am praying for this one to work out ok. It's Maya's first litter and so far she seems to be doing ok

Meet the cast

I put an ad in the newspaper over the weekend that I was looking for a 6-8 month old doe. After it turned out that Blacky is indeed a boy and the litter that was born a few days ago was dead, I wanted another doe to a) bring new blood in and to b) not put to much strain on Mia and overbreed her. I got two calls on Sunday afternoon and agreed to look at both does. 

On Monday I went to check out the first doe (I named her Maya). She is the same age as Blacky (born June 2013) and is a German Giant. I took her home with me the same evening. I also took home her daddy who I got for free. I am not sure what I will do with him yet, as I am quite happy too keep Muckel and Blacky as bucks and as a purebreed he is too large for me but I might cross him with Mia and then sell him.

Maya - 8 month old German Giant

Maya's daddy - currently Mr No name

Today I looked at another doe and took her home with me as well, she was born in August and is now 6 month old. She is a cross breed, which makes her ideal, not too big and not too small, just perfect. I have named her beauty.

Beauty - 6 month old cross

Let's see how the three of them settle in

It wasn't meant to be

Life and death of a homestead is a part of the homesteading journey. When Mia was pregnent the first time, I was a nervous wrack, would she be a good mom, would the babies freeze, would she eat them... She was a great mom and I was please about this.

I have bread unsucessfully at the end of November and then again bread her in January. I expected babies around the 4th of February but wasn't sure if the freeding was sucessful or not. I am still a novice at this and can't tell if a rabbit is pregnant or not, so any litter is a bit of a suprise game. Well Mia didn't do any of the usual nest building stuff and the 4th passed without any babies. So yesterday I did a bit of background learning on breeding rabbits and planned to do another mating on Friday and/or Saturday this week.

When I got out this morning to feed the rabbits. I noticed that Mia just started to nibble on something. Turns out it was a baby. Mia gave birth during the night to three babies. Unfortunately they were all dead by the time I checked on them at 6am.
I think it was a combination of things that did not enable them to survive, it was quite cold, Mia didn't build a nest and I am wondering if it was my mistake that she didn`t build a nest because I didn't clean her cage a day or two before she gave birth. Last time I did clean her cage 2 days beforehand but she indicated that she was building a nest at that time, so I knew. This time she gave no indication and I din't know....

I will mate her again on Friday/Saturday as planned. I have learned a bit more on the breeding and pray for better results this time.


On a side note.... Blackie turns out to be a boy.... now I am looking for another doe that is about 9 month old to breed him to.

When things don't go as planned

When you run a homestead, garden or backyard farm, things often don't go as planned. Yesterday, one of the rabbits had an accident and managed to knock two of it's front teeth out. Now that rabbits front teeth were slightly deformed anyway... I kept an eye on the rabbit yesterday evening and noticed that it wasn't able to each much, if any due to the knocked out teeth. To avoid anymore suffering for Muffin, I decided to butcher the rabbit today after work. This was so not how I imagined the butchering of the rabbits would go but sometimes things don't go as planned.

Now to be honest, the butchering of the rabbits was the one thing that I dreaded to an extent. I have watched countless of times when a rabbit, duck, geese, chicken etc. was butchered but I have never done it myself. I was nervous that I would not be able to do it, nervous that I would cause more pain to the rabbit, nervous about doing it wrong... You name it, I was nervous about it.

I am not going into detail here but in the end, it worked out pretty good for my first time and I was nervous for nothing I guess. Muffin weight in at 1.8 kilos, which is a decent size but she was also the smallest out of all of the young ones.

Update on the rabbits

It's nearly midnight and I just got home from the movies where me and some friends watched the hunger Games part 2. I read the book and loved the movie too. Since I am not tired, I figured it might be a good idea to give you an update on the rabbits

As I got my rabbits rather late in the year, the breeding season for them was rather off, seeing as the young once only arrived in the beginning of July. For me this means extra cost raising them through the winter when there is no food and I have to buy supplement food. Not very self sufficient if you ask me but it was unavoidable this year.
The plan for next year is to have babies from January through to March, so that they can be butchered in September/October and I don't have to raise them through the winter.

Yesterday I tried to get a grasp on how much the little once weight. They are five month old now while many people told me they butcher their rabbits as early as 12 weeks, I wanted to have a t least some meat on them and wanted them to turn 6 month before I butchered them.

I used to keep two of the little rabbits together until mid last week when I thought that one of them looked rather small compared to the other and I separated them all. Turns out I was right. Snowy and Muffin shared a box are two opposites for various reasons. Snowy is a massive 6,5 kilos, while Muffin is just 4,5 kilos. Muffin also has a slight issue with her two lower front teeth from what I noticed. I will see how this week turns out and if she is putting on some weight but if not she will be butchered next week. Junior and Blacky are both 5 kilos each but Blacky will stay with us for one season at least as a breeding doe.

Snowy, a massive 6.5 kilos

Muffin age 5 month 4.5 kilos

Junior 5 kilos

Thumper, my 2013 breeding buck

The 2014 plan is that I hopefully get one more litter fathered by Thumper in either late December or early January. I put him and Mia together again today, and hopefully that union will be fruitful, if not I am out of luck and Muckel will have to get the job done as Thumper will be my Christmas Meal.
Blacky who was born in July will be a breeding doe for 2014 and I will try to put her and Muckel together at the end of January.
Mia, my other breeding doe was put together with Thumper today and if God will, we have babies shortly after Christmas. If that works out, I will put her with Muckel at the end of January/beginning of February. If all things work out, I will raise 3 litters in 2014 with a potential 4th one depending on how things go.

Blacky, 5 kilos, 2014 breeding doe

 

Mia, my breeding doe

Muckel, my 2014 breeding buck

New rabbit hutch

Snowy

Muffin

Blacky

Muffin, Snowy and Blacky

Blacky

Junior left all alone

The baby rabbits are growing nicely. So far they shared a hutch (always 2 together) but with them growing quickly, it was time to separate them. I spend yesterday evening building a new hutch for the rabbits, which will also allow me to have more rabbits in the future. I also planned ahead, as Blacky will be bread next year, so she is staying in the bottom hutch, where she will have enough space to breed. Junior is kept in the previous hutch and I might breed her too next year but am not sure on this yet. Muffin and Snowy will butchered once they are big enough, which is probably around February/March. Last Friday I put Mia and Thumper together and if things work out, I will have another litter of baby rabbits when I return from the UK. I would have preferred to have them sooner but with being in the UK, I could not let someone else deal with potential baby rabbits, let's just hope that we have a mild fall as last year with not too much frost until the middle of November.

Rabbits

Mia

Muckel

Thumper

Snowy and Muffin

Junior and Blacky

The baby rabbits are now close to 10 weeks old. I have separated them from their mom last week and as luck would have it, I ended up with four girls. That made housing them together much easier, and now Snowy and Muffin live together as do Junior and Blacky. Mia looks glad to be on her own again now, as space was getting a bit tight with four bouncing little ones. 
I am now busy planning on how to proceed. I am very pleased with how first time mom Mia dealt with everything, so Mia is definitely staying on as a breeding doe. I am planning to breed her in December or January again but not to sure if I breed her to Thumper again or to Muckel.
Due to Blacky's color, I want to keep her as second doe and breed her to Muckel once she is old enough, which should be in March/April next year

So far the babes are striving and growing quickly and are an absolute joy. They are still a bit shy and jumpy but especially Snowy and Muffin are calming down great already. Blacky and Junior are more active and all four of them are little Hudini's if I turn my back on them while feeding, good thing they can only escape from their cages and not the surrounding area too.

It's fun to see them grow and I can't believe how much I learned about rabbits in those last couple month. I remember how scared I was to do something wrong and accidentally cause death to the babies but also how utterly petrified I was to put my hand in the nest and search for young ones, once it was clear they would be born any day. I imagined they felt like little naked baby mice and I kept quickly poking my finger in, scared to touch anything :) Turns out they are much cuter then baby mice and don't feel squishy or whatever else I imagined them to feel like.