Hippity Hoppity

One of our rabbits is due to have babies, well her official due date was yesterday, Friday September 26th. Rabbits have on average have a 31 day gestation period....meaning they go 31 days from the date they are bred to when they give birth. Pretty amazing. This particular doe had 11 babies the last time she kindled (rabbit terminology for giving birth). Thats a lot of babies! We thought that maybe she wouldnt be able to take care of all of them but she proved us wrong. All of them lived and are growing quickly. We are wondering how many she will have this time??? Her nest box is in place with plenty of straw. She will get in her box and make a nice place for her babies and will also pull fur from her belly. Not only to make a nice warm place for her babies to be but it also exposes her nipples making it easier for the little ones to feed. They are born with no fur and their eyes are closed. Like the naked mole rat from Kim Possible. Their eyes open after about 10 days. We are careful not to handle the babies too much as we dont want to get our human scent on them. Some moms dont like that and will kill the babies. You do need to check and make sure that all of the babies were born alive and check again in a couple of days, just dont touch them too much and try not to disturb the mom. The mom usually is only in the nest box with them at night and that is to feed them. After a few weeks the babies are able to come and go out of the next box. They start to nibble on the hay and rabbit pellets (food) and drink from the water bottle, also nursing from mom. We leave the nest box in so mom has a place to get away from all of the baby activity. Once the babies can get up on top of the nest box we can take it out since mom no longer has her "safe zone". The babies can be weaned, taken away from mom, at about 6 weeks and given rabbit pellets, hay and water. We are raising the rabbits for food so the quicker they can be born and put in the freezer means less that we have to spend on feed. Plus we dont want to have a bunch of babies to care for once our Iowa winters set in. It can get pretty cold around here! We have a littler of 11 that were born on July 27th so they have been around for about 8 weeks. We did have a mishap with their mom however. Thinking that she wasnt bred we put her in with the buck. They mated so my husband went to put her back in the cage and realized geez she just had babies. Oops, but it had been quite a while since we had purchased her so we thought she was not pregnant and we hadnt put her in with the buck when we got the rabbits. Oops, well it was a learning experience. So we did take the 11 babies away from her fairly early, if I remember right they were only 30days old or so. We just didnt want mama to give birth and already have the 11 hopping around in there. So they probably havent grown as quickly as they would have being in with mom the full six weeks. But like I said its a learning experience and its nice being able to know where your meat is coming from and what they are being feed and how the animals are being treated.