Notable events rabbit and homesteading wise are not huge. I got more work done on the studio which is less a homesteading thing, and more a house/job/less stress thing. I can't wait to finish that studio though so we can get the stuff in the garage moved up there, and I can have an indoor space to work on the hutches. That will make my life much easier, and enable me to do wood work at night. The studio is in the last stages of getting the electrical system in. Once that is in we can get a certificate of occupancy, and everything else can be finished over time since it is cosmetic.
As for the rabbits, Sunny and Twilight have been pooping cecotropes for the past couple of days. Neither of them have been losing weight from how they feel, but it is something that causes concern. In both cases I went in this morning and cleaned out as much of it as I could without taking the rabbits out of the hutches for a full cleaning which isn't feasible in the 30 minute morning check through. I will be keeping an eye on both of them for that.
Umbra is a whole different issue. He had mites that I found this weekend and have been attempting to treat with olive oil to drown them. If that fails in the end we will use Ivermectin to deal with the issue. So far that seems to be doing well. Unfortunately it has offended Umbra fairly significantly and he has been moody, unfriendly, and refusing his pellets. He isn't losing much weight, and he is readily eating hay still. We are keeping a close eye on him at this point.
Finally we have been going through 2 fills of the water bottles on the hutches with litters per day. Once at around 8:00 AM, and once at around 5:30 - 6:00 PM. Each bottle is 1 liter and when we get to them they are almost empty. I tried putting a second bottle in for Dawn's hutch and it was left entirely untouched though the first bottle was empty.
Data
Alright, I finally finished a good data form and would appreciate critiques of it! So far things that are a concern about these data sheets for me are as follows.
1: Identification of the rabbits is purely by weight. In the future I'd like to change that but I'm not sure how since they are so similar in appearance other than weight.
2: I need to put in a column for tracking weight of food and what types of food were given.
3: Our housemate suggested keeping track of percentage of water bottle consumed or number of water bottles consumed per day. A great idea I hadn't considered to help people out with how much water their rabbits will need while they are out.
Dawn's Litter's Sheet
Sunny's Litter's Sheet
Right now they are set to any can view, and only the Lady of the House and I can edit the sheet. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions I would be happy to field them. If they are good ones I hope to improve the sheets for future litters. So please, examine, critique, and question! I am specifically wondering if anyone knows how to put the dates over the chart portions of the data sets on GDocs. I haven't figured it out (or even googled how) to do it yet.
Thursday I will try to do a solid discussion of the data we have at this point. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing from you all.
Ok! Looked through the data sets and I have a few comments.
ReplyDelete#1: You want to label at least the column descriptions with what you're measuring in. Grams, I assume for the weights. I don't think you'd lose track of it personally, but it'll be important when you share these with people officially.
#2: For things like percentages, you probably only need 2-3 decimal points at the end. It'll make it much easier to read than having long strings of numbers. Anyone who wants more complicated numbers can do the math from the rest of what you've provided.
#3: You probably want to do the temperatures in three columns so you can produce averages there too. And charts.
#4: You want to try to be more consistent in your notes sections. In Sunny's set you have the phrases "rushed to leave, missed weight check" and "missed due to rushed departure." Seeing something different might lead someone to believe there was something else worth noting.
#5: What does "T" mean under precipitation?
#6: You probably don't want to include things like predictions and death weights in your primary columns. When you go to make a chart, they'll get in the way. Better to skip the day and just track it in the notes than have them mixed in. I like the way you left them blank in Sunny's set.
Keep in mind, most of these are just my opinions. But I thought they'd be helpful in thinking about some of the nitpicky aspects of producing a data set. Unfortunately I don't know how to do charts in GDocs, but I can poke around at it if you want. In general, all the data is impressive, so way to go!