March Litters Update (Day 3 - March 29)

March Litters Update (Day 3 - March 29)

Time for an update on the seven litters that were born 3 days ago. Everyone's doing fine! Growing fur, and mostly growing fat.

Litter DCK Choir and Cinder

Choir had 10 - all look good.

There are for sure some chocolates in there! Looks like 2 solid chocolates and one chocolate otter. The rest are 'self' black and black otters.
You can tell which are the selfs and which are the otters by the colour of their bellies and inside their ears.
Pink ears and bellies means they are otters.
Mom is a black otter and dad is black.
In order for the chocolates to appear, BOTH parents have to be carrying the gene for chocolate.
Chocolate is recessive to black.

In the video, you can see how they “POP” and hear the little noises they make. Baby bunnies are usually fed only once a day, so that means it's REALLY important to catch Mom when she goes into the nest to feed them.
Unlike many other animals, does do not lie down to feed their babies. Instead, they stand over them. It's the baby's job to catch a nipple as fast as possible, for she will only stand there for a few minutes. Right now they are still deaf and blind, so when they feel something that COULD be Mom (like my hand), they will jump and pop open their mouths to try and catch a nipple.

Litter DCL Cindy & Trigger

Cindy has 7. You can see how fat their bellies are. That's a good sign!
In the video below you can probably count 6 fairly easily.
If you look closely, you should be able to find the 7th under the pile (top right of the video).

Litter DCM Windy and Andy

Windy has a BIG litter - 12.
A couple look like they aren't getting quite as much milk as the others.
Most rabbits only feed their babies once a day. We'll have to wait and see - I've had does raise a dozen or more before.
Windy is a broken chocolate, and Andy is a broken Sable.
Windy has a BIG litter of 12.
4 broken, 8 black(?).
They don't all look the same shade of black, so we'll have to wait longer to find out for sure.

Litter DCN Tink and Atticus

Tink's 9 babies are looking good.
I don't have video of them.
I'll try and get some for the next update.
Some of these look like they will be sables.
Sable babies go through some really cool colour changes as they grow.
Initially, they look kind of blue.
When the fur comes in, it is often silvery (I have NO idea what's going on with the greenish one!)
A little older still, and the fur starts to look frosty-tipped, as hairs come out darker at the roots.
Eventually, their colour will look like Burmese cats.

Stay tuned….

Litter DCO Cebreez and Chai

Cebreez has the smallest litter, with only 4.
They look pretty fat though, and it looks like two of them might be tris.

No video of these guys either - my battery was running low on my camera.

Litter DCP Conina and Buddy

I don't have any new pictures of this litter.
She made her nest beside the nestbox in the very back corner of her cage.
Any time I try to look at them, she jumps into the nest and hovers over them.

We'll just have to wait.

Litter DCQ Cerise and Comet

Cerise has 11, as it turns out. She's a big doe so should be able to manage fine with that many.
She also had her babies beside the nestbox.
She seems to like sitting in her nestbox BESIDE her kids.
I've left the nestbox in place because, well, she likes sitting in it and isn't messing it up, but also because the box helps to keep the nest she did make in place.

When they are really small, babies that end up out of the nest rarely find their way back in. In nature, their nests are usually underground, and the ways out of the nest are up. That means that any babies that end up out of the nest will naturally fall back in. Nests are usually on the same level as everything else in a rabbitry, so most of us keep an eye out for babies out of the nest and just put them back in when we find them.

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