Baby Update!

I took new pictures of the babies today at day 12! They are stinkin' adorable! Their eyes have just opened and they are slinking around the cage chasing their Momma around trying to get more food almost continuously.

The 3 white rabbits. 

The 2 brown bunnies.

The 2 black bunnies.

All 7 together in the same basket as the first pictures. The growth is just exponential! The little light brown guy is just the most adorable of them all. 

I also have 7 Orpington eggs in the incubator right now.  We're on day 19 so I've stopped turning them and I'm doing experiments on ways to get and keep the humidity higher. We've had several hatching probelms in the past because the humidity hasn't been high enough. *RIGHT NOW* (because I just checked it) it's sitting at 99.5 and 81% so perfect. Hopefully it'll stay good all night. I really want to figure out what our hatching issues were. We'll find out soon I guess.

Ohhh More Babies!

White rabbit had her babies! She had 7 total here they are at 4 days old:

 3 white babies

1 dark and 1 light brown baby. (The light brown is totally my favorite rabbit we've had so far.)

2 black babies. 

I've got to admit I've totally become smitten by the tiny little light brown one. C says we can keep the little fella and work him into the breeding schedule since he IS so different to play with colors! YAY! Yeah, it's the small bizarre things that make me happy. 

The Netherland Dwarf babies will be ready to be sold in the next week or so. We will probably keep 1 if we can reverify that it IS a doe. (Yeah, we still have no true idea what we're doing, but we're doing it well :p ) They've gone from SO small to bunny size in 7 weeks! 

Those are all 3 the same Bunny! The last is Charles taken yesterday, at 6 1/2 weeks. Charles is the one we are probably going to keep and breed to Oreo. Ooooh the colors that we could get could be fun!

This is Oreo. He weighs a little over 2 pounds and it's not looking like these babies are going to be BIG so probably the standard Netherland Dwarf 2 pounds or under.. But all the others in the litter were the same color as the Momma doe. Yep. We actually sit around and talk about the color of bunny rabbits. Not for any purpose other than to see what colors we think we might be able to make. I guess when that stops being amusing, it's time to stop having bunnies. Clearly, we aren't there yet.


Oh we also go these the other day!

These big fluffy ladies are Buff Orpingtons. They are young laying age and have settled into a fairly nice laying pattern after a few days of getting acquainted with their new barn mates. We got them mostly as a compromise for the fluffies the goats stepped on and killed, but these things are pretty funny. They *talk* when they lay in these odd quirls and chirks (for the lack of a better description of it.) We have 1 Orpington rooster I've named it "Opie" because it's reddish and well. Why not?

Look at this big boy! Adams is weighing in at a full 50 pounds now and he looks so ferocious!

 The geese are big now too :) And they bite everyone but me! BWAHHAHHAHA!

 One of our egg layers! She likes to lay them in a different place every single day. Although, now we actually CAN play "Duck, Duck, Goose"!

Not So Patiently Waiting

This whole *farm* thing requires Patience. A lot of it. Waiting for this to grow, that to hatch, this to start laying.. It to get hotter, colder, drier, wetter. I am not a patient person. I want things to happen. Now.

White rabbit is DAYS away from having a litter. DAYS. She's a giant fat rabbit right now. HUGE. 3 chins, lays on her side and all possible times, growls if you go near her cage. White rabbit has always been our friendliest rabbit. Now she hisses and growls. She's due soon. She's been playing with building burrows and nests but has seemed dissatisfied with them all, so we put a big wooden (so she can chew it)nesting box in her cage for her to see if that makes her happy. She bit me twice getting it IN but she's been arranging IN it so I guess in bunny land that's a like? We're all so excited since this is our second attempt at baby bunnies. We've got a bet at how many she'll have - since it's her first litter. C has 6 or more - I took 5 or less. She's a flemish giant/lop so she *could* have 11 or more.

Soon the Netherland Dwarf babies will be ready to sell. We've decided to keep any that are female. Unless they're all female. We don't want that many. We'd breed that female back to Domino, the other Netherland Dwarf buck we've got. These bunnies are more costly to obtain because they are harder to breed so if we have a couple of sets of good breeders the bunnies may be able to at least pay for their own food. (White Rabbit and the other black doe, Jefferson, are for meat purposes or cheap pets primarily. We've found that it's actually very difficult to find Netherland Dwarfs. Aiming for a supply/demand thing.) But, the babies are too small still for me, at least, to tell gender. So I may have to see if I can hit up some of the rabbit people I've met and see if *they* can tell of if we just need to wait longer.  Won't that be an odd message "Hi, you don't know me. But can you tell me if this has a winky?" Yeah.

Then there's the chicken problem. The problem? The goat(s) have killed all the little fluffy ones from our hatches. Lambie stomped on the last remaining one last night..The ONLY good news is that it wasn't the puppies. They didn't even drag it around after the salsa lesson. Those fluffies were (particularly the orange flufflies), of course, the birds The Boy were attached to. So we're looking for a few Big birds that are orange and fluffy and full sized that would fit into the current flock we've got. I came across the buff orpington and so far that or the buff cochin seem like a good match. Right now is the *wrong* time of year to try to find laying aged birds. I have never seen either of these either. But, when has that stopped us? That's right. Never. We've been looking for a few weeks, but haven't struck the winning lotto on hens yet. I'm thinking there's some magic way to look for them and just don't know what it is.

But this all requires waiting. I hate waiting. I want it to be magical and POOF! Alas, it seems to not work that way. We have to wait for things to happen on their own.