New Zealand White Rabbits – Holly’s litter at 3 weeks old
Both Holly and Eeny had litters this month – six babies each – and they are now 3 weeks old and hopping around their pens. It will be another 3 weeks before they are weaned and Mum can have a break. They will be ready for new homes when they are 10 weeks old – after 6th June. Won’t be able to tell what sex they are until then.
Now they are old enough to be picked up and cuddled – they are so cute – this is the best part about breeding rabbits.
Coltsfoot – it’s name comes from the hoof-shaped leaves.
Every spring, as soon as the daffodils start to come out, I start to look for coltsfoot flowers – then suddenly one morning, there they are, little yellow stars, dots of sunshine, decorating the path – the stems seem quite invisible until the flowers come out.
Like Butterbur, the flowers appear before the leaves. In fact, Pliny and many of the older botanists thought that the Coltsfoot plant grew without leaves. Rabbits like coltsfoot leaves but they will have to wait awhile for the foliage to appear.
Coltsfoot is a well-known herbal remedy for irritating coughs and respiratory disorders and Coltsfoot tea sweetened with honey will help soothe a dry cough.
The leaves were formerly smoked to relieve coughing and are even today included in herbal tobacco.
The seeds are crowned with a tuft of silky hairs which goldfinches like for lining their nests.
Catalogue of catastrophies with Eny’s latest litter!
New Zealand White rabbits are beautiful, very tame and very friendly so they make excellent pets. They are good house rabbits as they are clean, usually using the same place as a toilet all the time. They also grow quite big, quite quickly which is why they are often bred as meat rabbits. Once they reach 3 months old they generally have very few health problems, BUT, until they get to ten weeks old they can be notoriously difficult to rear.
Eny had 6 babies, two of them died in the first few days – no idea why – it was just like she abandoned them. The other four were fine at 3 weeks old, then one of them mysteriously just flaked out and I found it cold as stone in the morning. And then there were three!
Next day I found one of the babies in the hen house, goodness knows how he got out but I managed to catch him and reinstall him safely with his mum. Checked everything but couldn’t figure out how he got out but added extra security just in case.
Two days later – he’s with the hens again – but this time something has attacked him and he’s looking very sorry for himself indeed, so I put him in a pen on his own, cleaned him up and covered him in Aloe Vera gel (works wonders on everything from rabbit scratches on me to hens attacked by foxes – and poorly rabbits).
The next day he looked a lot better, but the shock must have been too much because he was dead the next morning.
So now we are down to two – one of which is quite small and therefore not really suitable for breeding although she’s really sweet and would make an excellent pet. Often people who are looking for rabbits as pets want two of the same sex to keep each other company. Guess what – the other baby is a male. So I am looking for someone who would like a small NZ white doe as a pet and someone else who would like a buck as either a pet or for breeding.
Breeding NZ whites is never simple! (But never boring either!)
On a more positive note, for the first time I have kept one of my own does and one of my own bucks (different mothers and fathers) for breeding and they are just old enough now to breed. George is beautiful, he’s a really large buck and was the only baby Cowslip had in her last litter so he had the best possible attention. He’s just over 6 months old. Holly, my new doe, was one of Eny’s babies. She is now just over 5 months old. Alhough it’s still winter, the weather last weekend was quite mild so I thought I would see how they got on together.
I never leave a doe with a buck unattended as sometimes they can fight so I always keep an eye on them – there’s always lots of things I can get on with in the rabbit shed – cleaning up, washing food bowls, stroking the rabbits (my favourite task!). After 10 minutes of chasing each other round I put them back in their pens and tried again the next day – with no luck.
Holly really doesn’t like being kept in a cage – the other rabbits are fine but she absolutely loves being in the run outside so she gets to go out more often than the others. In the spring she will have a hutch outside but, for the moment, she’s safe in her cage. So I thought I might put a nest box in her cage to see if that changed her mind about mating. (Usually you put the nest box in a week before the babies are due because otherwise rabbits tend to make a mess in them and you have to keep cleaning them out.) Anyway, Holly loved her nest box and settled down happily in it. Next day when I introduced her to George again, she mated straight away, so I am hoping Holly and George will be parents for the first time in February.
Let’s hope the babies in this next litter are less problematic than Eny’s last litter.
Rats, they fought the dogs and killed the cats and bit the babies in the cradles, and ate the cheeses out of the vats and licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles…
Shropshire might not be as bad as Hamelin, but we don’t have a Pied Piper to lure the rats away and, in the past, I have had problems with rats eating tiny baby rabbits. Finding half eaten babies in the morning is not one of my fonder memories! After persevering with rat traps for ages, we finally had to resort to rat poison – you can buy packets of liquorice smelling poison that you don’t have to open but just place in the boxes. The council used to come out but they don’t any more – although you can still get advice from your local council. They provided us with safe rat poison boxes which are placed along the rat runs. I keep an eye open for any rat droppings which act as a reminder to put poison down again. It doesn’t matter how careful you are with never leaving food lying around, rats always find a way – and they cause so much damage eating holes in everything too.
Looking up the spelling of Hamelin, I found the poem – I didn’t know that Robert Browning wrote it and it has a different ending to the fairy tale I knew. It’s one of the poems on this website if you want to read it for yourself.
Well it wasn’t exactly life-threatening – but she saved me being really scared by a rat. As usual she came with me to let the ducks out and she followed me into the rabbit shed – where she pounced on a rat and quickly killed it. It was probably half dead from poison or she would never have caught it – she is getting on a bit! But it was dead very quickly and I didn’t have to kill it. Horrible things. Always makes me think of the poem:
Rats, they fought the dogs and killed the cats and bit the babies in the cradles, and ate the cheeses out of the vats and licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles…
Shropshire might not be as bad as Hamelin, but we don’t have a Pied Piper to lure the rats away and, in the past, I have had problems with rats eating tiny baby rabbits. Finding half eaten babies in the morning is not one of my fonder memories! After persevering with rat traps for ages, we finally had to resort to rat poison – you can buy packets of liquorice smelling poison that you don’t have to open but just place in the boxes. The council used to come out but they don’t any more – although you can still get advice from your local council. They provided us with safe rat poison boxes which are placed along the rat runs. I keep an eye open for any rat droppings which act as a reminder to put poison down again. It doesn’t matter how careful you are with never leaving food lying around, rats always find a way – and they cause so much damage eating holes in everything too.
Looking up the spelling of Hamelin, I found the poem – I didn’t know that Robert Browning wrote it and it has a different ending to the fairy tale I knew. It’s one of the poems on this website if you want to read it for yourself.
I didn’t intend to grow enormous pumpkins because they are totally unmanageable – I just wanted some large enough to make Jack’o’Lanterns for Halowe’en and some to store for the winter to make spicy pumpkin soup (see recipes) to warm us up on Bonfire Night and to cheer us up for December lunchtimes.
Pumpkins must love rabbit manure because this is the result! I do admit that I did dig quite a bit of manure into the pumpkin patch. Fortunately, not all of the pumpkins are this big but it’s going to take all the boys to lift this, a saw to cut it in two – and probably all day hollowing it out, taking out the seeds and cutting the flesh into manageable chunks for soup!
Last year I dried pumpkin seeds on baking paper in a slow oven and they were really tasty – they made a great substitute for peanuts and I served them in bowls with olives.
They will be ready for new homes by the end of October – there are 9 babies. They all survived which isn’t always the case with NZ Whites. They can be very sensitive to their surroundings, they don’t like changes, different people, strange noises – some breeders have a radio on all day so the rabbits get used to different sounds. I leave the shed door open all the while so the rabbits can see what’s going on outside and get used to different noises – so my rabbits are used to different things and the babies are too.
I’ve had problems with new does, sometimes it’s because they are new mums with their first litters and they really don’t seem to know what to do! I have had stillborn and abandoned litters, and often the babies manage to get out of the nest box somehow so every morning and night I check properly that there are none getting cold away from the nest.
Many people have solved the problem with crossing NZ Whites with Californian rabbits. They are also white but with black tips to their ears – they are a large breed but generally not quite as big as NZ Whites. They are however far less sensitive and traumatised, they seem altogether a much hardier breed and if you are breeding meat rabbits would be an ideal solution.
Baby rabbits must be some of the most adorable babies – once they have all their fur and their eyes are open. They are born blind and deaf and pink-skinned but by 3 weeks old they are miniature versions of their mum hopping about their pen.
By 5 weeks old, the babies always scramble for a bit of their mum’s green food – this time of year it’s Shepherd’s Purse, rocket, spinach, dandelions, clover and the occasional nasturtium leaf (they love nasturtiums but they are quite strong so one leaf a day is enough).
There are lots of spring plants that rabbits like and, fed in moderation, they are really good for them – too much green stuff can upset their digestion – but a few leaves of a few different plants every day is fine – and they really enjoy them.
Comfrey leaves and flowers are a favourite – not to be confused with foxglove which has the same shape leaves. Comfrey is very easy to distinguish at this time of year as it’s in flower and foxglove is just leaves.
Foxglove is digitalis and very poisonous so make sure you pick comfrey plants with flowers.
Rabbits like most herbs, these are chives which have a slightly onion smell.
Another spring weed in garlic mustard, or Jack-by-the-hedge which has a mild garlic scent – rabbits like flowers and leaves – smaller plants are most tender.
And of course the dandelion, just leaves and again in moderation – just two or three leaves a day.
I like to give each rabbit a choice of leaves and see which they eat first – they don’t all choose the same ones first. Dandelion likes comfrey and Fiver likes chives.
Every day I get real pleasure from picking a few choice titbits and watching the rabbits enjoy eating them – the hens like some plants too, particularly the brassicas, but their favourite is always bread and they come running when they see me carrying a basket.
Eny’s babies are 4 weeks old now and they are hopping about happily.
Chives are growing quite well in the garden and the rabbits love them – just a few stalks each day along with their piece of apple.
The original Easter Bunny was the Hare. The Anglo Saxon’s believed that the hare laid eggs in its form to signify the imminence of the year’s rebirth. However, the church changed the hare into a ‘bunny’ in order to lead the people away from pagan stories and ways. The Spring Goddess was often depicted as a woman’s body with the head of a hare.
