Now breeding, and the benefits of fallen leaves.

I tried to get a photo of masses of leaves falling, but apparently that doesn't work on a camera phone (unsurprisingly). But it does give the impression of what our woods looks like at the moment. Instead of seeing it as a lot of leaves on the ground that are unsightly (which I never have really minded anyhow), I'm actually happy to see leaf fall, it's extra material for the garden beds I should be building in the next few weeks.

We got started with the first of the breedings, and this is a good time to introduce our new buck. Right the blue buck is "Starry Night" from Michelle Chandler. He's the one we traded Umbra for. Today he bred with Sunshine this morning. We'd been planning to give up on her when she started developing Sore Hocks again, but they went away just as fast so we're giving her ONE more chance. We probably shouldn't, but we do like her conformation otherwise and her temperament for the most part.  We were also going to be breeding Dawn this morning, but she wouldn't lift for Dorado, so we'll try her again tomorrow. We're planning to breed Sunshine to Dorado this evening just because, we'd love to have Creme babies out of her. If he happens to have recovered from his heat sterility by now, great! If not we'll still get babies out of each doe. The only one we won't be doing the split breeding between is Twilight because we Just want blue babies out of her.

On the current babies end, all of the babies are out, about, and moving around. Perfect timing for our intentions to start the breeding round that we're beginning. Fortunately this also means that Twilight has stopped offering to assault my face and or hands every time I come near the babies. One thing I can say is that my lack of doing weight checks every day after the first week or so has affected the temperament of the babies. They're less hand friendly, though their curiosity for the most part gets the better of them quite quickly. I'm just going to have to spend more time working with these babies to make sure they aren't fearful now that they're moving around than I would have had I been handling them every day so far. It's not terrible, it's just something worth making sure of.
Speaking of friendly, the teens are almost aggressively so. They are all doing quite well, and it is a nice way to wake up in the morning with being swarmed by piles of bunnies. They do eat a really staggering amount of food though! As you can see in the background of the photo Left they completely and utterly demolished the box fort we gave them. I suspect they enjoyed it greatly before they finished it off, shredded it, and in large part ejected the remains from the hutch before I even came out this morning and finished cleaning up after their party.
The runt has been doing fairly well, but just hasn't gotten the size of the rest of its siblings and hutch mates. This gives it certain advantages. If you see the foot and butt sticking out over one of the silvered black kits that's the runt. It's so small it can just dive over the heads of the others, and they don't get out of the way, it just hangs out on top of everyone else and stuffs it's face. What we're likely to do with that one is just give it a stay of execution and let it grow out a bit more so we don't have one tiny rabbit among the large ones in the freezer. We're around 11 days from butchering out this round of teenagers. What I'm probably going to do is handle them in two batches. Noticeably larger kits in the first round, then everyone else.

Last, and unfortunately, Sergeant and Lottie still aren't home, and we're starting to look into buying replacement hens to make sure there's enough of them to keep warm in the coop this winter.