New kits arriving soon!

Zahra and Vanora are both due very soon.  Tomorrow will be their 29th day, nest boxes went in today and they started their nest building, no hair pulling yet but they constructed a nice hay nest in the box.  This will be the very first little for Zahra, so I am just hoping for a nice size litter of healthy kits and that she's a good momma.  This will be the third litter for Vanora.  So tomorrow begins my running to the rabbit shed over and over throughout the day and late into the night to check on the soon-to-be mommas.  I hate waiting :)

A cage full of babies!

These are my youngest babies, just under 6 weeks, from my last two litters (Jeneva x Bialy and Zurina x Bialy).  There are 11 of them (6 from Jeneva - 5 from Zurina).  They just moved into their own cage since I have re-bred their mothers and it's time for weaning.  I plan on getting another cage to put my weaned kits in since 11 in one cage is quite a lot, it works for now but as they get bigger they will take up quite a bit more room.

Vianca

Introducing "Vianca", a singleton out of a Vanora x Bialy litter.  She is the second doe I have kept from one of my breedings and keeping within my theme, her name means 'white' and it starts with V, since her mothers name starts with V.  I really like this little girl, she's very sweet and doesn't mind to be picked up and held, though of course right now she's still on the small side (she's 8 weeks old now).  She's got a while before being bred, but she's maturing nicely and I really like her temperament.  If you sit out in the shed you'll occasionally see her get a little spurt of energy and hop around the cage for a few seconds. 

Zahra

Introducing "Zahra", the first doe I kept from one of my own breedings.  She is from one of the Zurina x Bialy litter.  She was from a larger litter but we lost all but her and her brother due to feral cats terrorizing them.  Something I will post about in the future.  I kept her and she is now 6 months old and pregnant with her first litter.  She is due to kindle around May 10th.  She is a grouch of a girl, she rather just be left alone and keep to herself, doesn't care to be handled much but if she can produce good litters of kits she is free to stay here for quite some time :)  On the up side she's a pretty relaxed girl, she doesn't chew on and destroy things (her mother demolished a plastic feeder very quickly and is trying to destroy her metal feeder too) and other than occasionally pawing in her feeder and wasting some of the pellets, she doesn't get herself into any trouble :)   I am guessing she will put on another pound as she matures a bit more, she's probably around 10+ pounds now but I have not weighed her in quite some time.

Nest boxes

Like most everything else, we made our own nest boxes (or my dad did anyways), but he forgot the measurements I gave him for the door and ended up making them a bit to tall, so to get them in the cage, I have to turn them sideways - which means I can't take the nest box out of the cage to check on the kits but I have worked around that little snafu.  I just pull the box to the door of the cage and check on all the kits.  I forget the measurements of these boxes but will measure them soon.  The front is about 3 inches high, it keeps the little kits from crawling out but low enough for the doe to easily get in and out and the babies, when they are older, can easily get in and out of them.  The babies also like to sit on top of the boxes when they are older :)  They get a little stained but they are throughly cleaned when the babies are older and the box is removed and I change the bedding and clean out the box every week or more after the babies are born.  How often I change the bedding depends on how many kits there are and how old they are.  They make more of a mess the older they get and of course with a larger litter there is more feces and urine to be concerned about.  The picture above is a pic I just took of the empty nest boxes, but below is a picture of a nest box in use.  I put hay and shredded paper in the boxes and the does pull their hair to make the nest.

And a picture of momma Jeneva checking on her babies.  I also have a video of one of my does pulling hair, I will have to post that when I work on videos.

Baby savers

With my first litter, and only 2 kits, I had absolutely no problem with the kits being dragged out of the nest box and crawling through the sides of the cage and falling on the ground.  Plus they were already pretty big since there were only two and she waited to the last possible minute to have them, so it didn't take them long before they were to big to go through the cage walls.  But with the litters I had after that, occasionally a kit would get dragged out of the box (latched on to mommas nipple and stayed latched while she left the nest box, taking the baby along with her) and even though they are tiny, they can sure move and I ended up walking out to the shed, counting babies and discovered there was one missing.  I searched all over and I found the baby at the other end of the shed - thus making me research baby savers.  I tried several things but finally found some wire that works great.  I cut it to so that it covers 3 inches around the cage, on all sides.  I just used zip ties to attach them and waited to see if the does would bother them at all (they love to chew) but they have left them alone (the first few things I went through the messed with).  Since installing the baby savers I have had no lost babies, though occasionally one will still get out of the nest box but it can't get out of the cage.

And if you haven't figured it out already - you can click on all the pictures to enlarge them.  

The rabbit shed

When I started out, I didn't have anything to put the rabbits in - a building or covered shed of some sort.  So they started out being caged under a shade tree - since I got them when the temps where in the 90's (and the temp only got hotter through the Summer)  I found a great spot in the front yard that was up against the woods under a tree that had a big overhanging branch that kept them in the shade at all times.  We didn't get much rain through the Summer so that wasn't a big worry, when we did get rain I covered them with a big tarp until it passed but I knew I would need a place to put them and shelter them from the elements, especially with Winter coming.  We bought a covered car port of sorts that has worked great.  I can't remember the measurement on it but will figure that out and post, it's big enough for all the cages I have now (7 at the moment, want to get another cage to put weaned babies since I only have one at the moment) plus all their stuff, feed pellets, hay and alfalfa cubes, etc.  This was wonderful during the Winter, it's totally covered and you can zip up the front of it, so during the Winter I would keep it zipped up to help retain heat in the building and keep them from getting any sort of draft. It totally keeps the rain out and we had quite a bit of snow this Winter, and of course it kept them nice and dry and out of the snow.   Now that it's starting to warm up again I keep the front open unless it rains and if it starts to get any hotter I can pull the side up on one side so they can get a cross breeze and keep them from sitting in stagnant air.  Here's a picture I took tonight...

This is a picture taken from the front of the shed (it's right on the side of our house, I can walk out the front door and over to the side of the house to tend to them).  The 'doors' are staying open and bungee'd back now that it's warm outside.  I have 4 cages on one side and 3 on the other.  The big gray bin in the back has a bail of hay in it for them so it's off the ground, when it rains the water tends to run in sometimes and it would get the hay wet - plus this keeps mice out of it. Their food bin is to the left of that - it's a garbage can with a lid that snaps so nothing can get in their food.  The bucket I mainly use to sit on :)  As of right now they are sitting on two pieces of wood that are raised on saw horses until we can build a shelfing unit where we can stack the cages, it will have a drop pan between the bottom and top crates so the feces and urine doesn't land on the rabbits below.  But as of right now this is the set up, I hose the wood off quite often as a few of them tend to pee on the wood.  I will be taking pictures of everything when we do start making the shelfing unit, and will be posting about that, I want to be able to put 4 cages on the bottom and 4 on the top - all I need for the numbers I have are 8 cages for now.  I have the buck and 3 does I started out with, plus another doe that I kept from one of my litters that is at breeding age and another young doe I kept from one of my last litters, she's still got several months before I can breed her.  So I have 5 does and 1 buck at the moment and one growing cage that the weaned kits go in, but I would like another as I tend to have 2 litters around the same time and they can sometimes be very large litters.  Oh, and I have a florescent light that hangs from the top of the shed, but my lights have blow, so I strung the heat lamp up there for the time being until I can get more light bulbs, but it's got light so I can check on the rabbits after dark (especially if I have a doe that is due to kindle).

Water bottles

So I started off with the normal water bottle, but they just didn't hold enough, I was filling them constantly, and during the Summer they would get nasty and start turning green and they are SO hard to clean, so I turned used soda bottles (the 2 liters) into water bottles, which is also great because when they start to get dirty, you can just replace it with another soda bottle.  You can buy just the nozzle part for the water bottle so you can attach them to soda bottles (water bottle conversion kits), it also comes with a spring like thing to hold the water bottle to the cage but I found out quickly that those sucked.  The spring was always to tight and would end up making the bottle leak from the pressure on it, and if you tried to stretch the spring at all it would end up not being springy anymore and would be too loose to hold the bottle up.  So again with the wire hangers :)  If you have read my previous posts, wire hangers have come in very handy for me while building 'accessories' for the rabbits cages (check out the door latch post).  So I took a wire hanger and cut a big piece out, I bent one end of the hanger to form a hook that would hook onto the cage and then held a water bottle up to the cage and bent the wire to form to the bottle, when I would get it bent all the way around the bottle, I would bend the other end into a hook (cut off any excess) and then you have a nice sturdy piece of wire that can hold a heavy soda bottle full of water on the cage without it squeezing on the bottle and causing it to leak from pressure.  Here's a picture of one of the bottles on a rabbit cage.

Door latches

Okay, so this one took me a while to figure out, but I finally did it with some help from a friend.  The latches I was using were just horrible, they were difficult to open and killed my fingers, I had looked up many many pictures of rabbit cages and this seemed to be the most popular type of latch.  And I couldn't find anywhere to buy them (though of course I did find a place to order them online after I had already made them - LOL)  I got a wire hanger and some wire cutters/pliers and started off by holding the wire up to the cage to figure out where it should bend, I bent the bottom first, where it would attach to the door, then worked in the loop and made sure the top of the loop was level with the top of the door so I could stick another j-clip on it so the latch wouldn't move around (I attached them with j-clips that I used to put the cages together with and squished them even tighter with pliers so the latch wouldn't shift at all).  After the loop, I bent it out and then back in slightly, so there is a 'hump' above the loop, that adds extra tension to the latch so when you hook it to the cage, it's nice and taught.  Then after the 'hump', I figured where I wanted it to latch to the wire and then created a kind of hook end on it so it would grab the wire easily and wouldn't slide off of it.  To open the cage, you press in on the top of the latch and move it slightly over with your finger and it comes undone easily but the rabbits can't pop the latch.  They have worked great.  Here's a side view of the latch so you can see where the 'hump' is for the added tension.

Hay feeders

As I said in the previous post, I made the hay feeders out of the scrap I had from cutting the door out.  Since all the hay feeders were full when I took pics of them, they are hard to see.  Anyways, when I had first made them I attached them inside the cage and later though "why the heck did I do that!", I could have put them on the outside and saved myself from opening every cage to give them hay and they were also taking up space inside the cage, so I removed the ones I had put inside the cages and put them on the outside.  They are about 8 inches tall and 6 inches wide and I cut them so that there were 2 inch pieces of wire on each side, I used the bottom pieces that stuck out about an inch from the bottom and bent them so they were attached to the cage (the bottom of the hay feeder is about an inch or two from the bottom of the cage) and then bent the first 3 pieces of wire on each side so they were attached to the cage and left the others unattached but bent in so it would hold the hay but not poke through the cage.  You'll understand better when I get some pics of them without hay in them.

Here is a view of the hay feeder from the front, I had some leftover pieces of door guards after putting them on all the doors and I used the leftover pieces to put on top of the hay feeder so there wasn't any sharp points to grab me.  

Here's a view of the hay feeder from the side, because it's not attached to the cage at the top, I can pull it back and put more hay in it than you would think.  The rabbits pull the hay in through the wire and you save a lot more hay this way.  In the beginning I would just put it in the cages with them and most of it would end up falling through the floor of the cage or get spread around the cage and a lot of hay ended up being wasted this way.  It's been great having the hay feeders, I can just grab handfuls of hay and pop them in the feeders and they are good to go.  I'm sure I will be making more hay feeders in the future, so when I do I will take pictures of how I actually make them (it's easier to understand through pictures) and how I attach them, you just need some pliers!

And the cage building begins...

And so the first project, building cages.  Here is a picture of my first 4 rabbits after having made our first 3 cages (the does were in the new cages and the buck remained in the McKee crate until we got more wire to make more cages) and before I had the rabbit shed (they were under some shade trees at the time).  I will post more about making the cages in another post and the various additions to the cages (home-made door latches and hay feeders, etc.).  First we knew we needed 1" x 1/2" wire for the bottom of the cages and 1" x 2" wire for the sides and top of the cages.  We also needed wire cutters, which we already had at home, to cut the wire (which is probably the hardest part of all, killer on the hands).  We also needed j-clips and j-clip pliers to attach all the pieces (sides, floor and top) together.  When we bought the wire we found out we could make 3 cages out of the wire we bought, with little scrap (enough to make doors and hay feeders) but the measurements of the cages had to be 36" long, 24" wide and 17" tall.  I would have liked to make the cages taller but if I made it any taller I would only have enough wire to make 2 cages with a lot of scrap left over.  I decided on making the doors 14" wide and 10" tall and from the wire I cut out to make the door it was perfect for making a hay feeder!  I didn't take pictures as I made the cages, which I wish I had now, but I'm sure we'll be making more cages in the future and if/when we do, I will make sure to record the progress with pictures :)  So basically, after we had the pieces all cut we clipped them together with the j-clips and then after it was all assembled I cut out a space for the door.  I used that scrap for hay feeders and some other extra scrap for the doors and used j-clips to attach the doors.  Though you can attach them so they swing open to the side, or make it so it opens down - we opted for the doors to open down.  At first we just latched them with whatever we could find (clips of some sort) I finally figured out how to make a latch for the door which I will go into more detail about in a later post.  I later found a place where you could order them but it's just as easy to make them yourself.  I used j-clips to attach it to the door and messed with it for a while until it latched just the way I wanted it to.  I was also able to find the door guards online and ordered some of those so that the sharp edges where the door was cut out wouldn't cut or scrape you when you reached in the cage.  Here is a picture of one of our cages, complete with door guards, latch, metal feeder, water bottle (another thing I will get into), hay feeder and baby savers (another thing I will post about later).

Zurina

Introducing "Zurina", one of my does - pictured the day after we picked them up from their breeder.  She is a laid back girl who probably makes the most noise out of all the rabbits.  She is always making honking and oinking sounds, it's quite entertaining to listen to.  Her first litter she produced 9 kits, 3 of them died young but with a first time mom with a very large litter, that is bound to happen.  We later lost 4 more due to the cats (like I said in the previous post, I will go into detail about that in a future post).  Two of them survived, they turned out to be a buck and a doe and I kept the doe, she is now 6 months old who I named Zahra (also means 'white') and she is pregnant with her first litter.  Zurina's second litter she kindled 6 kits (one still born), the remaining 5 of them are doing great at just over 5 weeks old.  I have not weighed her since she has matured but I would guess she's around 11-12 pounds.

Vanora

Introducing "Vanora", one of my does - she is pictured the day after I picked them up from their breeder.  Vanora is probably my most laid back rabbit and probably my biggest rabbit as well.  Her first litter she produced 6 kits, who all eventually died due to cats (which I will explain in a future post).  She was a wonderful mother and after waiting a while, while we were dealing with getting rid of the feral cats, I bred her and she produced her second litter, but she only produced one kit.  She was a wonderful mother and the kit grew fast, it turned out she was a doe and I am keeping her (she is now 8 weeks old, named Vianca - also means 'white').  Vanora is a sweet girl and she can make quite an array of noises when she feels like it.  I haven't weighed her since she has matured but I would guess she's around 12 pounds, I think she is probably my heaviest rabbit.  She is pregnant now and due around May 10th, 2011.

Jeneva

Introducing "Jeneva", one of my first 3 does (all sisters), she has turned out to be one of my favorites.  She was always the sweetest, reaching her head out to your hand to investigate and accepting pets and was pretty good about being picked up - though from what I have found, they usually just don't care to be picked up, but she tolerates it well.  She produced my first litter in the dead heat of Summer, I bred all 3 does but she was the only one to catch the first time, she only produced 2 kits but for her and the bucks first time breeding and the horrible heat and humidity of the 2010 Summer, I was happy to have my first 2 kits.  She is a wonderful mother, she has since had two other litters, the second one a litter of 8 that she aborted due to feral cats terrorizing my rabbits (another story for another post), she kindled early and they were all still born.  Her third litter she produced 6 healthy babies that are just over 5 weeks old and doing wonderful.  She is pictured the day after I picked them up from their breeder, will have more mature pictures to add in a future post. I have not weighed her since she's matured but I would guess she is around 11-12 pounds.

Bialy

Introducing "Bialy", he's the buck in the herd and this picture was taken they day after I picked him up.  He's pictured in a McKee dog crate that I first used after I got them since I still had to build cages.  It worked great while I needed it.  Bialy didn't care much for human contact when I first got him, he would rather just be left alone and keep to himself.  But after breeding a few times, he discovered that people were awesome because they brought him does to breed :)  Now he's very sweet and loves to be pet.  I have not weighed him since he has reached full size but I would guess he's around 10 pounds.

My first post on Shannon Down Rabbitry

I figured I would start a separate blog for my Rabbitry venture as there isn't a whole lot of information on the internet about raising meat rabbits.  After having been inspired by www.rawdogranch.com and seeing they were raising meat rabbits I started doing some research.  It was hard to come up with anything on the internet but I was able to find some good information and I researched the different meat rabbit breeds and decided on raising New Zealand Whites.  They breed easily, they produce large litters and they grow fast so it just seemed like the best breed for what I wanted.  I also figured out that I wanted to start off with 3 does and 1 buck, after looking around on the internet for NZW breeders near me I contacted Peter Comunale (aka Carolina Pete - www.carolinapetesrabbitry.com) who lived about an hour from us and he had 3 does and 1 buck who were the right age for me to come and get.  So I picked them up on April 5th, 2010 - 3 does who were sisters that I named Jeneva, Vanora and Zurina and an unrelated buck that I named Bialy (all the names mean 'white').  They were about 8 weeks old, the buck was just a little bit older so I had a while to wait until I could breed them since I wasn't going to breed them until they were 6 months old.  In the meantime, I didn't have any rabbit cages - though I had some crates that worked perfectly for them for a while, I needed to build cages for each of them.  More on the rabbit cages in another post, but first - I must introduce the first 4 rabbits that got me started...