Rabbit Momma’s!

With bunny Dixie’s last set of babies, we decided to keep one of the females for additional breeding stock. Now as you know, our bunnies are Giant Flemish – they are some man sized bunnies – and this girl was certainly no different.  Fully grown she is larger than both her momma and her poppa.  I mention this because, she may have inherited her size from her parents, she apparently got her disposition from somewhere back in prior generations.  I innocently believed that she would immediately fall under my rabbit whisperer ways, and love me up like all the other bunnies….

Oh  hell no!  Absolutely not!  Testy did’t cover it!  Practically ripped my hands apart if I didn’t get out of the way once I had put her food down. We hadn’t given her a name yet…… But I sure had a few in mind!  Time, patience and rabbit whisperer cuddles, and I had managed to preserve my mangled hands and had gotten her to let me pet her and scratch her ears.  At this point I figured I shouldn’t call her “The B” anymore and settled on Honeybunny as her name, based on her honey coloured fur.

Not too long after that, it was time to breed Honeybunny.  I have to admit that I was more than a little worried about this one.  This is one big girl and Tom (her spring fling!) is a lovely, gentle, slate grey New Zealand bunny.  More than half her size….  think about this for a minute.  If she decided to get testy with him, she could rip him apart in a heartbeat!  And what about the, ahem… mechanics of the situation!??  She gots herself a pretty glorious caboose!  Lotsa junk in the trunk and our poor little guy has to scale that mountain!  This had disaster written all over it!!!

Worse yet, you have to put the girl in with the boy!  Moving 20lbs of wiggling, squirming bunny the 5 feet to the other cage is trickier than you might think.  So we tossed her in with Tom, crossed our fingers and held our breath, waiting for the chaos to start. And danged if this little hellion didn’t practically waggle her behind at Tom and say come and get me!  Head down, tail up, this girl was ready to go…. and Tom was apparently up for the task.  Never again will I doubt the tenacity of a New Zealand male rabbit!

So with nature having taken it’s course, we started counting the days until the  Honeybunny/Tom babies would appear.    We had bred Sweetiepie at the same time – with our big Poppa Texas, so both our lovely bunnies were due at the same time. Just before the due date, we put a birthing box in the cage so that the momma rabbit can prepare for the arrival of the babies.  They spend their time making a nice little cubby hole type nest out of hay and when they are close to delivery, they will pull out some of their hair to line it.  One very experienced momma and one brand new momma.

The two of them put on quite a show.  The hilarity started three or four days prior to the arrival of the babies.  Chuck and I went in to give them their dinner and found a bit of a frantic Honeybunny, running around in her cage with a mouthful of hay!!  Her expression said it all…. “I know I am supposed to do something with this hay…. I am just not sure what!”.  This went on for days! Next door is Sweetiepie, fluffing and tunneling her hay into a glorious baby den, it was a work of art!  Honeybunny is a hot mess with nothing that resembles a tunnel, a den or anything suitable for putting her babies in!  It was pretty hysterical to watch – with more than a little concern!  I even considered showing her what Sweetiepie put together – but I didn’t want to mom-shame her! 

In the end, as often happens when you are dealing with animals on a farm, Sweetiepie had a difficult delivery of a very large single baby that died during the birth.  Honeybunny did end up creating a warm and cozy cubby for her babies (I could make a case for it being a fluke!) and had two lovely healthy babies  One slate grey, one silver – Great job Tom!