Sometimes It's Tough

Sweetie Pie's litter of kits was textbook. She bred easily, nested on schedule, delivered easily and has been a great mom. All her kits were a good size at birth and they're all thriving now. On the other side of the coin is Sapphire's saga...

Sapphire was much harder to get pregnant than Sweetie, but we were pretty sure there was success. As planned and just like with Sweetie the nest box was put in a few days before we thought she was due. The few days passed and no kits, no nesting, no bib hair pulling. Then all of a sudden Monday afternoon there was 1 kit in the bottom of the cage. According to protocol, we placed it in the nest box. The next morning , it had been rooted out of the nest box AND out of the cage. Now knowing this was intentional, I put the kit in with Sweetie. She seemed to let it nurse but we lost him Tuesday afternoon anyway.

During the frequent checks on Sweetie Tuesday, to see if she was accepting the new baby, we discovered an additional kit with Sapphire. So about 20 hours had passed- strange indeed. This one was in the nest box for a bit, but eventually wound up on the ground Tuesday evening, and there was another kit born. I'd already buried the first, so I took the 2 that were left, tried to get them to drink milk replacer and then put them both in with Sweetie.

Sweetie is still fine with this arrangement. It's hard to tell if they're getting nursed since rabbits nurse only once a day and are very secretive about it, but they were both alive and curled up with the older babies at the morning check. Sapphire then had 3 more babies, one stillborn. Now though, she's nesting, the live babies are all tucked safely in the nest of hair and straw just as they should be. I took the stillborn and buried it, checked back in after lunch and there's another that's just been born.

Right now (Wednesday evening), that leaves 2 with Sweetie, 3 with Sapphire, and 2 that didn't make it. Hopefully after 48 hours of delivering babies, Sapphire can focus on the ones she has and with Sweetie's help we'll have 5 from Sapphires litter- fingers crossed and all that.

If all goes well, they'll look like these cuties in a couple of weeks!