Baby rabbits!!

You might remember that a month ago the rabbits finally mated.

As it is the middle of winter, the nest boxes are uninsulated metal, and baby bunnies are born bald, we lined the nest boxes with sheeps wool and nice absorbent puppy toilet training pads. Due to a slight oversight we had mated them with exact timing so that they were going to give birth while Doug was in London. Fortunately there is not much you can do to help rabbits with their babies, so the person looking after all the animals didn't have to do anything except feed the mothers and empty the poo trays as normal.

When Doug came back and investigated the nests he found that all three had had litters.
You can see a little white head here in the sheep's wool

This is the nest box overall. Blondie whose nest box it is had dug out the sheep's wool from under the absorbent pads and made her nest in that. Seems to be working well

We also covered the top of the cages so the mothers felt more secure as we have had a couple of occasions in the past where the mother has either eaten or abandoned the kits.

The proud fathers don't get this sort of pampering

All we have to do now is keep most of them alive. In the past we have had trouble doing that as lots of them just drop dead once they start coming out of the nest box. We have found that a treatment called Coglavax seems to magically help - the vet recommended it after doing an autopsy on one of the dead ones. I have been trying to find out what it actually does and it is to prevent a thing called clostridial enterotoxaemia but there are possibly several strains of this and it may also vaccinate against other things. The treatment seems more common for lambs and calves so there is not mucn information. The last litter, quite few died very young, so it is hard to know when best to inject them, at the moment they are too small for it to be feasible and we are worried about upsetting the mums, possibly next weekend when they will be about to open their eyes and just starting on solid food (at around 14 days).