Yesterday, checking on the baby rabbits, we noticed that their eyes were juuuust beginning to open.  Ridiculously adorable.  :)  We think Nefertari is continuing to pluck herself bald, which is rather distressing.  She looks pretty moth-eaten.  Good thing it's summer.

All the adults are loving the fresh grass.   Yay, happy bunnies!

We got the four Toggenburgs from Casey today.  Two proven milkers, a yearling doe, and a yearling wether.  We'll butcher the wether come fall, but looks like we'll be heading into the milk goat biz next year.  *facepalm*  What are we (I) getting our(my)selves into?

Ben came over today, too.  He's a big Akbash/Turkish Anatolian Shepherd/Great Pyrenees mix.  It's been a while since I've seen him, and he's HUGE, even though he's a bit over a year old (I think).  Although he's bred as a flock guardian, he's also kind of a big doofus.  He likes to lean against people and enjoys having his hips rubbed.  He's currently in dire need of a bath and a good brushing.

Unfortunately, he's also barking like hell a lot tonight.  Every time Greg or I went to go see him, he'd be fine, nothing there.  Ben's gone off several times this evening and I keep going outside to shush him, but it's late and I'm tired.  Hopefully, he'll calm down soon.

I got a call from my parents tonight.  Apparently, Mom has started vermicomposting.  She's referring to herself as a "worm farmer."

I'm so proud. <3

They say that once a dog gets a taste for chicken blood, it will forever go after chickens.  I wonder if the same is true for rabbits.

Yesterday morning, sleeping in after a night of insomnia, Greg woke me to tell me that another one of Nefertari's babies had died.  She'd been nibbling on its ears, too, but it was out of the nest box and around the corner.  It was the only black one she'd birthed, although Hatasu has a black one as well.  We were concerned about the gray one with tan, so we transferred it over to Hatasu's cage to foster.

And now, after stories of yet more dead bunnies, here's your unicorn chaser:  four wee little bunnies on day seven, all curled around each other. :)  A couple of them are hard to see, but they're all there!

Saturday afternoon, as Greg and I were getting ready to head to our neighbor's 3-year-old's birthday party, we checked on the baby rabbits.  I discovered, much to our dismay, that one of Nefertari's babies had gotten a hind leg tangled in some loose threads.  We gently cut everything away, but it was apparent that the baby had broken its leg and was going to lose its foot.  We decided to put the baby back in with Nefertari and see how things went.  It was a bit smaller than the others (who have been growing by leaps and bounds!), so it was likely it hadn't been able to nurse, either.

*sigh*

Well, Nefertari took care of the whole ordeal by eating the lame baby.  We came out to check the next day, and the infant had vanished completely.  No sign it had ever been there.  It was a bit distressing, but I appreciate that Mother Nature took care of it all.  Next time we know--no loose-threaded rags.

On the bright side, we have pictures!  Prepare to die of cute!  These are pictures from yesterday, meaning that they are five days old in the shots.

This one is an odd color--gray with tan.  Thutmose, the father, is white with black spots.  Nefertari, the mother (and Thutmose's daughter), is white with tan spots.  It's a gorgeous pelt color, so we'll keep this one around for a while.

This one is a more standard color.  You can see the black eyeliner, dark ears, and even a wee couple of spots along the spine.

Thutmose got his nails clipped yesterday (for the first time), which he didn't care for too much.  I tried to wrap him in a sweatshirt and put him on his back, but he didn't like that idea at all--even nipped me a couple of times.  Luckily, I was wearing leather gloves.  He did just fine when I kept him upright, so that'll be how we do them in the future.

However!  We had to trim his nails because we put him into a new, larger hutch and I was afraid we might not be able to get him once we put him in there.  He'll stay in there for the time being, but once the babies are older we'll shift Hatasu, Nefertari, and their brood into the big hutch so they all have more room.  It's a double-decker and quite palatial; we got it second-hand from some friends (the husband is allergic to rabbits, so they'd never have any), but had to re-hang the side door before we could use it.

THAT took all damn day.  Okay, maybe three hours, but it was the second time we'd gone at it.  Fortunately, Ben (our sharecropper) arrived on Saturday, so he was able to give us a hand.  Seems we really needed three pairs of hands to do it after all.

We did quite a lot of other stuff around the farm, too:  trimmed back the goat-bent fencing, added in a new section, and extended the top with chicken wire.  Again, three pairs of hands really made this a lot easier; I couldn't believe how much easier it was than when Greg and I did it alone last year.  Ben transferred a bunch of seedlings into the garden--mostly tomatoes and peppers--while Greg made wire cages for them.  I had plans to finish with the fencing, but my Ryobi battery ran out, so instead I wrangled up a mostly-completed hay manger out of wire fencing, a used tired, and baling twine.  We ended the day with a few beers (cider for me!) around the bonfire.

Today, of course, it's snowing. *sigh*

Just sent out an email to the first round of people who expressed interest in getting turkeys from us this year.

The skinny:
- $20 buy-in (first come, first served: PayPal to [email protected] holds your place)
- feed costs are rotated among members
- please give us your veggie scraps for the turkeys!  Saving in the freezer until you get 'em to us is okay.

Goat meat will be available this fall; rabbit meat will be available throughout the summer.

Questions?  Want to buy in?  Email us at [email protected]!

We're not sure if the mother (Hatasu) caught when we originally bred the rabbits, but the baby (Nefertari) is due any day now.  She's made a nest of cardboard scraps and fur, and when Greg brought down some strips of rags, she practically grabbed them from him to add to her nest.  It's yucky and wet outside, but they're under shelter and each have a nesting box.

As for timelines . . . When we got home from Denver last week, the mesh between the two halves of the cage had been knocked askew and all the rabbits were running around together.  The male, Thutmose, kept chasing Hatasu around and humping her, so if she wasn't bred before, she's bred now!

EDIT:  WE HAVE BABY BUNNIES!  Nefertari had three (Greg saw them <i>right</i> after they were born) and Hatasu, from what I could tell, had five.  Greg is bursting at the seams with pride and excitement, and we have champagne chilling in the freezer. :)

EDIT:  Hard to tell how many each has, but it looks like Nefertari had four and Hatasu had six or seven.  Sooooooo cute!  Each of them has a full-black baby, they all have wee little rings around their eyes, and at least one has the full speckled stripe down its back.  We attempted pictures, but the flash whitened everything and panicked the new mamas.

Turkeys are ordered.  We have 10 heritage birds coming to us.  We got the grab bag of odds 'n' ends, so we don't know what breed(s) they'll be until they get here.  They're due to ship June 14th, so there will be many adorable pictures at that point.

We're looking at doing a CSA-type of arrangement for the turkeys this year.  I will post cost/expectations, and if people aren't up for the commitment and we have extras at the end of the season, then we'll sell them for $6/lb.

The past several days, we've been awakened by a territorial robin.  Said robin starts flying into the window to attack his reflection at, oh, 6 am or so.  This means that as Greg and I are lying in bed, cuddling and getting ready to start our day, that the background music sounds very much like:

*silence*
*bonk*
*silence*
*BONK*
*silence*
*flutterflutterscrape*
*silence*
*BONK*
*silence*
*taptap*
*silence*
*softbonk*
*silence*
*BONK*

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much that will dissuade this avian frat boy.  Rolling the window shade up and down only makes him fly off for a few minutes, as does Greg running outside naked and throwing wood chips at him.  (Can you guess who has a higher tolerance for this sort of thing? *grin*)  I've resorted to taping strips of ripped-up sheet on one of the windows, but that doesn't completely stop the robin.  Not to mention, we have a LOT of windows around the house. *sigh*

Our other feathered attacker is a woodpecker, who also likes to start doing his thing at about 6 am.  So, between the gentle *BONK* noises coming from the windows, we have Gatling gun noises coming loudly from the roof above our bed.  It sounds like we're being strafed.


Who said living in the country was quiet? *laugh*