Into the Maternity Ward
This house will soon be overrun with babies.
To start, our French Angora rabbit, Hester, delivered 3 kits last night. As rabbit gestation is so short, you often don’t know until delivery whether or not the animal in question is even pregnant. Yes, there are ways to guess, but nothing is certain. That being said, we never have to wonder with Hester*. She goes from being a relatively sweet and mild-tempered rabbit to Bunzilla the last week leading up to delivery. This is no joke – she’s drawn blood. Anyone that ever thought farming with rabbits was for the faint of heart has obviously never owned them before. Meanwhile, her cousin Marianne* sits in the hutch downstairs from her, not giving us any indication of whether she’s expecting or not. She did that last time, to the point where we figured that she hadn’t taken, and then delivered a litter of 11. Go figure.
And then there’s the ducklings. They haven’t arrived yet, but unlike Marianne’s babies, we actually know that they’re coming! We ordered 25 Cayuga ducklings from Murray McMurray Hatchery that are due to be shipped to us the week of October 3rd. Being that October 3rd is pretty much over as I write this, it’s definitely going to be more ‘sooner’ than ‘later.’ Are we ready for this? Erm, in that ‘ready as we’ll ever be’ kind of way. In the grand scheme of things ducks seem small, but to us they mark our next step into livestock.
So, the tally: we will have at LEAST 28 babies between the house & barn by the end of the week – more if Marianne kindles (rabbit term for giving birth) before then. Follow closely – we’ll keep you posted!
*We name our rabbits after literary figures. Hester comes from the Scarlet Letter, while Marianne and her sister Elinor come from Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility. We have Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events, Aesop of, well, Aesop’s Fables, and Agatha as in Agatha Christie. Elinor’s litter of 3 from this past June have not yet left us, and are named Jane, Don & Betsy, who are siblings from one of the books we had been reading with the boys for homeschooling.