The Cherished: I never thought I'd carry a rabbit in my bra...

Friday, 23 May 2014

I never thought I'd carry a rabbit in my bra...

I apologise for this post if you follow me on Twitter or Instagram as you'll have seen some of the photos here! On Tuesday morning I went out to feed our menagerie of rabbits to find five little additions in one of the hutches!

If you recall about a month ago, poor Lilly gave birth to 4 babies who sadly didn't make it. After we discovered that we didn't actually have two female bunnies, Lilly and the newly found out Billy were placed in different hutches until he had been dealt with at the vets! Ironically he was booked in on the same day that we found the babies and that in fact, rabbits could get pregnant again when they are already pregnant! How weird is that? I couldn't think of anything worse!

The morning after my heart stopped for a moment when I noticed there were only four little babies in the nest. I looked around the hutch frantically and found this little man at the bottom of the ramp, cold and lifeless. Scooping him up I was glad that on the Tuesday I'd read up on every possible situation. I checked his claws which were still clear and meant that there was a possibility he could be revived and popped him inside my bra of all places! His core body temperature needed to be warmed up quickly and against my chest was the best place for him while I got a hot water bottle to wrap in a blanket to place him on.

The next fifteen minutes seemed to last forever whilst I urged the little man to hang on in there and ran through what may have happened. He'd either wandered out of the nest (as he'd tried doing yesterday) and fallen as his eyes will remain fused shut until he's around ten days old. Or, as Lilly's blind, she may not have realised that he was feeding and inadvertently carried him off to the bottom of the hutch.

Finally, I caught a glimpse of his nose twitching and his little paws moving! I can't remember the last time I'd felt so happy - it had me smiling all day. After another ten minutes warming up he was fine to go back in the nest with his siblings and snuggled straight into the middle of them.

They continued to wander about that day and worried that the next morning I'd find more of them lying around the hutch, I decided to intervene. As we hadn't expected Lilly to give birth, I hadn't placed a nest box in the hutch. I improvised and put a box in for them and was relieved to find them all in one place the next day.

Lilly seems to have mastered feeding them now and they are much more content so they are now out of the box and back in a beautiful nest that their mum has made them. I can't believe how much they are changing every day, they are now three days old and starting to get their fur coat and ears are less pinned back. I've completely fallen in love with them!