The New Additions

We got 3 Rhode island red hens (or at least we hope they are hens). They are only 3 weeks right now. They are so much easier to take care of than rabbits, but there poop is much messier and they tend to make a huge mess of their water and food dispensers. The names are Darla (after little rascals), Chubakah or chewy, and Apple Cinnamon but they call her Mac as in the lap top because her name is apple. It is a new experience for our family seeing as we only have rabbits, dogs and cats. I plan on showing them in the fair and my dad plans on using their eggs for breakfast to save money. The rabbits do not like when the flies come during summer but, the chickens seem to love them! we are planning on building a coop under our peach tree away from the dogs and potential dangers.

BABIES!!!

We bred VT's Halo and Hoppin's Java Chip and we got Two chocolates and 2 chocolate chins and 1 broken chocolate and 2 charlie blues possibly. One of the chocolate chins might be a chocolate chestnut. Either way they are sooooo cute!!!!

Not a good morning...

So two Doe's had perfect litters nothing went wrong. But our third one that wasn't due tell friday had 9 dead baby rabbits on the wire this morning. Big plump rabbits... We are trying to remember if we had bred her earlier or not but we don't think so. We put in a nesting box for one baby that seemed to be breathing but instead the mom took out all the fur out of the nesting box and tried to find her babies to give them fur. Or at least thats what it seemed like.

New Babies!/ Bakersfield Show

Friday VT's Halo had her first litter and there were 7. It was Out of a silver tipped steel and a broken chocolate. An unlikely couple. Hoping for opals since when the broken chocolate was bred to our gold tipped steel they had an opal. We would like some lynx in the future so an opal would be a wonderful addition to our rabbitry. We had another litter on Saturday but only 2 were in this litter from Posey's Mae(REW) and DeSurra's Caspian(broken chestnut). She has been having small litters lately. One is almost a black color but has a white stomach. It could be something as simple as a chestnut or a black chin, but seems to dark. It was a solid to a broken but both were solids.

The Bakersfield Show was a success!! We had a lot of judges and luckily we had a lot of exhibitors to fill up the judging tables. The Holland lop specialty attracted so many breeders! The raffle was HUGE and it took my mom and a bunch of volunteers to make it as organized as we can get it. My dad sold his Uncle Gimpy's meat rub and chili mix at the show and it seemed to get the word out. In the Future he will sign up to have a booth at other shows rather than Bakersfield. It took a lot of work to set up this show and it didn't help that many of us got a stress headache even before the show started. I have to thank Chris Zemny for the Advil it really helped! The show seem to run smoothly and there weren't a lot of complaints. People seem to like the Cash prizes so we are going to continue with that for future shows. So overall the show was EXCELLENT! and next year will be even better!

Fun story...

So we had a rabbit we recently put out side that is constantly thumping through the night and had gone off feed. We were worried and thought we should move her back inside since we did not know why she would make so much noise and why she had stopped eating. We had a put a towel over her cage but that didn't help much. We even replaced her water bottle with a crock and it didn't make a difference. So in the middle of the night my dad went out there to check on the rabbits and he had left the light on and she didn't thump again during the night and she had eaten when we checked in the morning. It seems that if we leave the back porch light on she does not thump and eats her food. We experimented a little bit doubting that the darkness was the cause but it seems to be. We have a rabbit that is scared of the dark. We had moved most of my rabbits outside in an attempt to get them settled before the hot summer. We managed to move everyone outside except for babies and mothers seeing as the weather is being unpredictable and we don't have an outside heater. We don't know if we should move this scared rabbit back inside or not but she is really ruining our plans to have no rabbits inside if she has to come back inside. Oh well maybe she will grow out of it when she gets older, since she is still a young rabbit.

The Storm!

So we have a storm coming in for the rest of the week and we got a peak of how bad its going to be today. The rain was fun to walk in but the street was flooding. The Wind got so bad that someone got killed by a tree falling on his house. The plastic tarp that was protecting our rabbits from the wind has ripped so we need to find a new thicker way to cover our rabbits before the rest of the storm comes in. The KCRBA shed blew away today 2 weeks before our show. Just hoping there wasn't any severe damage to any of our show stuff. We have no workable plugs in our back yard in order to keep the rabbits warm so we are finding some creative ways to keep them warm.

Hope everyone else is keeping warm. :)

- Alison Votaw

Thats Unique.

So most of the people that have passed through Bakersfield know the only thing that could kill a rabbit here is the Heat not the cold, but on Monday night it was raining so hard and the wind was blowing && there was a freeze warning we decided it was time to do something for the outside rabbits. My dad managed to put up plastic around the back patio to protect from the wind. Then he managed to run over to Home Depot to get a heater. We also stuffed their cages with straw.
THEN the next morning as the family was getting ready the Breaker broke because i guess it couldn't handle an extreme heater, 1 curling iron, 1 straightener and a blow dryer all going at the same time. So on tuesday night we just had to stuff their cages with straw again and hope that it didn't get to cold. The breaker still isn't fixed but now that the storm has passed he have got tell tomorrow night to fix it until the next storm comes in. It is the wind that makes it so cold for the rabbits so hopefully if we manage to keep the plastic on we should be fine. There aren't to many disadvantages to it being cold, our pointed white mini lop has managed to darken up! :) and now all our rabbits are getting lovely soft winter coats, but there was no way we could proceed with putting the rest of the rabbits outside until we put up a permanent patio covering that covers the whole patio to block the rabbits from the wind.
Well thats all :). Maybe it will actually snow this year? (Wishful thinking)