So far I have seven for seven kits eating and growing. This seems like a bleedin’ miracle given the amount of risk in hand raising baby bunnies. Last Tuesday brought  mid-90s heat and the demise of Mama Rabbit, Lisa. With seven two week kits on my hands I immediately jumped into research mode to find a source of information on how to feed and hydrate these little guys. I called feed stores and read online sources from rabbit rescue sites to university extensions (a great source of accurate detailed information). While I had the tool for milk feeding, I was terribly concerned with the development of their digestive tract. I was also concerned with some of the rabbits that refused the bottle. I quickly found that as with human babies, little rabbits feed differently. I now have nicknames for them. I am pretty sure a couple, The Biter and The Licker, have habits Mama Rabbit would not have tolerated.

I also learned an interesting fact of rabbits, which is they lack gut bacteria to digest well. I knew they have sensitive stomachs and cannot eat just anything but I did not know that in order to develop needed gut bacteria, they eat their own poo. I also learned they have two kinds of poo, the normal round rabbit pellets we are accustomed to and then some secretive mucusy poo that comes out in a chain called cecotropes. It is commonly referred to as “Night Feces” not because they excrete it at night, but because they eat it and tend to do this when no one is watching. So its hard to spot. Turns out Mama Rabbit feeds this to her babies which is a critical step in they gut development. After a day of observation with the kits, I did in fact notice some of them chewing weird looking dry droppings off the hutch flooring. So, with my heart full of love and concern, I did my best to collect rabbit poo that they could munch on.You can learn more about cecotrophy from the University of Miami Dept. of Biology.

Now the kits get fed ~15cc of kitten milk replacer twice a day. I luckily have had help with this task from housemate and fellow gardener, Marcel. Luckily baby bunnies are cute so friends have also come over to help feed. That’s been super. Feeding seven rabbits one by one takes an hour. In fact, it is important to note for those interested in keeping rabbits, my farm maintenance time when from 10 minutes at morning and at night to 1 hour and 10 minutes twice a day. This is the risk of keeping babies. A last note on feeding is that at 21 days, these rabbits are ready to partake in solids. However,they aren’t good at self regulation with quantity and overfeeding can kill them since they don’t have developed digestion. I’ve been feeding milk in the morning then sprinkling snacks of feed pellets which they mouth to make moist and chew on (like baby biscuits), fresh parsley bits and timothy hay. I also put lots of fresh water in a bottle.

There are about three very active fast growing rabbits that figured out how to drink from the water bottle on their own. Everyone else is following suit. So far, even the two smaller rabbits that would clench their mouth shut at the bottle and lick instead of suckle, are catching up in growth. I call these guys “fuzzies” as there seems to be a hair to body growth ratio off for them compared to the other rabbits so they have a shaggier look right now. However, as of today everyone is active and bigger.