Fall Breeding is HERE!

Well, sort of.

 Eggs are in the incubator: 16 random duck and 14 random chicken. We know the possible combinations are possible just not which male *dated* which female. This particular batch of eggs was supposed to go to a guy who didn't care and just wanted eggs to hatch out. Since we hadn't tested fertility, I was going to sell them to him at the same price as eating eggs and just have him basically do our test hatch. BUT the day he was supposed to come get 60 eggs, his barn and incubator burned. So, 30 egg went into our incubator, 24 into someone else's that my mom knows and we had to throw the rest away. (Oy, that's hard to do..) I checked them today - it's day 5 - and all but 3 of the 30 have distinct veining so far!! We are so excited since we weren't even really sure they were fertile! A whole flock of little ducklings would be SOOO cute!

Our Black doe (I can't remember that poor rabbit's name for the life of me.. I currently call her Fat Black Rabbit or Rabbit with a Giant Dunlap) is due to have her litter Monday! She is working on her nest, but not pulling fur yet.. We probably shouldn't all be so excited by a rabbit having babies, but we are. Unabashedly so. Me, mostly for the genetics of it (we used Sausage - who is black but together with Hazel had 3 albino babies in their first litter ) The kids think it's fascinating to watch the Momma with the babies when they are tiny and are still trying to figure out how the Momma's take care of the babies.

We also got to talking about which rabbit(s) we wanted to breed. We figured having a rabbit or two to sell around Christmas time would be ideal and did the whole count backward thing. Then realized that we would need to breed NOW(ish) to make THAT happen. So we bred Sausage to White Rabbit and Anna (the Grey Netherland Dwarf) to Domino (the speckled Netherland Dwarf). It'll be really interesting to see what colors White Rabbit and Sausage have a second time and what Anna and Domino have. *Looks slightly ashamed* I'm a dork.

Although. Of all the babies so far, we are getting them all settled before the next litters are being born.  We aren't being like some of the freakish breeders with 650 babies who have to go to auction and sell the babies at 4 weeks for $3 because of poor planning. All of our litters are purposeful and planned and we wait until we KNOW where all the babies are going before we put 2 bunnies together. We have 1 bunny left from this last litter that we aren't keeping, but it's to feed up for someone - so even it is spoken for.

We went to the Fair today too! We saw a kind of duck we hadn't seen before and plan on trying to find a pair of :) They have the shiny dark green shimmery feathers. I guess some people go to the Fair for food or things to buy. We went to look at birds..  C saw the baby sheep and decided he wanted one, but I suggested that we slow down and actually *research* first BEFORE we acquire something else we have no idea anything about.

Hopefully, I will be posting pictures in the next day or so of baby bunnies!! Squee! 

Bunnies!! Updated..

The baby bunnies are about 5 1/2 weeks old now - in about 2 more weeks we'll start selling them. They've all grown exponentially! We've all chosen an favorite and decided to keep him.

Oddly, this little guy, Dopey, was the runt of the litter BY FAR and is now the biggest by several ounces. Not that we were all sneaking him extra food at all.. Nope. We've never done that. But this is also the only one of the bunch that has a *real* name and that the kids actually play with.   They pet the others to tame and pet friendly them, but they aren't attached to them. This was the plan - so it's good they got it. We let Dopey run around the house for short periods of time with the cats too - he's still a little small to be left alone with a clawed 13 pound cat so we keep the visits short.

These are the 3 white Demon Bunnies:

 Flop - the Demon Bunny with 1 flopped ear.

 Tubby - the Fattest of the 3 Demon Bunnies

 Tiny - the Smallest of the litter when we weighed them tonight. 

We only named these 3 because they ARE so identical so we named them by identifying features to make selling them easier when referring to them with the kids. (You know, so we aren't going "Can you grab that one bunny, you know the white one with red demon eyes?" and getting brought 3 bunnies by giggling children.) 

These are the 2 black bunnies: 

 Black Bunny # 1 

 Black Bunny #2

We named them SUPER creatively: 1 and 2. These two black bunnies aren't nearly as identical as the whites. 

And then the lone dark brown:

It IS named "You Know, The Dark Brown One". We're awesome, I know.

C is taking a BIG batch of roosters and drakes to bring home in dinner sized packages tomorrow. Well, 6 roosters and 3 drakes - so about 1/4 to 1/3 of our total flock. The drakes have been completely mauling the females and they are almost bald from it. They look so pathetic from it.

THIS:

Is Steve! There's a lot of random Cloudy with a Chance of Meatball jokes floating around continuously now. Not gonna lie, I start most of them. Steve came pre - shot, health tested,  friendly with other animals, neutered paid for, and litter box trained. He's fitting in pretty well. He's about 10ish weeks old maybe? The vet was pretty unsure exactly how old he is, but it's not like a week or 2 either way matters. He weighs 3.9 pounds today.