The rabbit kits are now around 12 days old – Ava kindled a day before Loretta – and their eyes are opening. This morning, all of Ava’s kits were out of their nest box and huddled together on the cage floor. Five of Loretta’s were out, too. Now that they can see, they’re going to be pestering their mothers to nurse every time they get out of the next box – and the does get annoyed. Continue reading “Day 12 Rabbit Kit Update – The Runt Grows”
Author: Carrie
Final Duck Egg Incubation Update
After 38 days of incubation, the duck eggs failed to hatch. We candled and gently tapped on them last night to ensure there were no signs of life. Unfortunately, there weren’t – none had even pipped internally, and a couple looked as if they had begun to deteriorate inside the shell. Continue reading “Final Duck Egg Incubation Update”
What You See Isn’t What You Get In Processed Food
What in the world is carrageenan doing in heavy whipping cream?? When we buy “heavy whipping cream”, we expect that it contain only that – heavy whipping cream! Apparently, that’s just a fantasy in today’s food culture.
When the runt of Ava’s litter needed hand-feeding, we ran out to the local grocery store to buy the needed supplies. This was a store that offers “natural” and organic food, along with a heck of a lot of conventional food. Fortunately, goat milk was available (though not raw, of course). No organic heavy whipping cream was available, though several other conventional ones were. Continue reading “What You See Isn’t What You Get In Processed Food”
Duck Egg Incubation – Day 36
Waiting for the duck eggs to hatch is like watching water boil. There’s a plethora of advice available about how to optimize an incubated hatch, but figuring out what works for a specific environment, type of egg, and incubator is a multi-factor challenge. Humidity needs, for example, vary by location; optimal humidity in an arid location would differ from a humid location. It’s challenging to keep the humidity at hatch above 65% relative humidity here without constantly adding more water, but putting slices of sponge in the water wells has helped maintain the higher humidity. Will that still be necessary in the summer? It may not be, but we won’t know until we try it. Continue reading “Duck Egg Incubation – Day 36”
Stuck Inside Due To Weather
We’ve been putting the teen chickens out daily in the tractor, but the weather has been crummy lately and the ground is saturated. It actually snowed quite a bit yesterday and that made the ground messy. Today is gray and damp, so the teens are stuck inside in their brooder based on the formula chicks + mud = muddy, wet, cold, and unhappy chicks. Continue reading “Stuck Inside Due To Weather”
A Kit Struggles To Survive
We checked on the rabbit kits today and found that one of Ava’s looked like it hadn’t been fed in a while – it was skinny and wrinkly. In comparison to its littermates, it’s also much smaller. Ava has the litter of 11, so we moved the “runt” to Loretta’s nest box in the hope that she would foster it.
In the meantime, we ran out to the grocery store to buy goat milk and heavy whipping cream, along with bottlefeeding supplies, to try to hand feed the kit. It’s pretty much “gloom and doom” on the web regarding trying to hand feed young kits, but we wanted to give it a little help; if it doesn’t make it, it doesn’t make it. We know there may be reasons why the kit won’t make it – maybe it has some physical problem we can’t see.