Guessing Game

Do you know what this is? I will let you try to guess for several moments before I tell you......

It was so soft and tiny. That is my hand holding it when it was only 3 days old. It weighed about 3 oz. It was hairless and blind.

O.K. do you give up? Or have you guessed a baby bunny? Because that is what it is!

It is so much fun to have baby buns, as we call them. We've never had baby rabbits before this year. Queenie was pregnant for exactly twenty-one days. I knew she was fixing to give birth because she had pulled out all of the fur from her tummy. I had marked the day she was "due" on the calendar and we skipped down the hill to check on her. Lo! and behold, we saw three babies in the nest box.

 a box o' buns...a week old

about four weeks old

But there were eleven babies total! We found out soon enough because several had died. We had to clean out the nest box and put in fresh hay. Slowly, several more babies died. Some were very small and had not been fed properly. One fell out of the box and was trampled. Eventually, eleven babies dwindled down to only four. This is actually not as sad as it may sound. As a first time mom, it was better for Queenie to have less babies to deal with. She was not as over-whelmed as she would've been with eleven. I personally cannot imagine having eleven little babies needing my attention all at once! Oh dear!!
They always have a few "extra" babies...it is just nature's way of ensuring that some survive. 

I have always found it fascinating that animals just know what to do. No-one ever tells rabbits to rip out their tummy fur so that their babies will have a soft, safe nest to keep them warm and so that their teats will be exposed and easily found by the new nurslings. No....no-one ever tells them and yet they figure it out, all on their own. 

 six weeks old

The four who lived are thriving and growing big. They hop and jump and flip through the air. The children like to sit in the rabbit pen with them and pet them and draw pictures of them. They will be finished nursing in just a few short weeks and they will be considered fully grown. It does not take them long to grow up, unlike human boys and girls who stay with their parents for eighteen years or longer.

When they are fully grown, they will look like their parents...like this:

Often, wild rabbits on our property come up to the fence where our tame rabbits are and "talk" to them through the wire. I wonder what they are saying?