All five children were awake and rowdy by 6:30am. On a school day! That never happens. Nev...er. Happens. But Sterling was out the door at 6:00am for his weekly Friday morning meeting on the hill and it woke the kids up. And they woke me up. It was still dark when Sydney went out to check on the rabbits, so she took a flashlight. She was out there for quite a while before she came rushing back in. She closed the sliding door and stared at me with excitment in her eyes.
"What?" I said, putting down the entertainment section of the newspaper. "What, What?"
"Mom, there's a baby rabbit on the floor of the cage and I think it fell." She rushed on in a breathless fury. "We have a baby rabbit! Pegasus had babies. We have baby bunnies!!!"
"Is it moving?" I asked, thinking about how cold it had been last night.
"Well, yeah, a little bit,"she said. Sydney recounted to me how she went out to give the rabbits water and food and saw a black lump on the cage floor. At first, she thought a mouse must have found its way into the cage or something. She wasn't sure what it was. Then she realized it was a tiny, baby rabbit. She rushed in to tell me.
"Mom! They had babies. We have baby rabbits." She could hardly keep her feet on the ground. Her enthusiasm was contagious to the other kids, who all followed her out the door to take another look.
When we bought our rabbits, they were both marked as female. Everything was fine until we saw Bella being very "affectionate" towards Pegasus. Then we checked and sure enough, Bella was a boy. So we put a birthing box in the cage just in case but knew that in the winter, fertility goes way down and babies are rarely born. However, this winter has not been very cold and now, we had at least one baby bunny.
"Rabbits know how to take care of bunnies. Let's let the mommy do what she knows is best," I told Sydney, when she came back inside. "I'll come out at check when the sun comes up." That being said, I was off to fix breakfast and manage morning chores. In the midst of the morning routine, Sydney snuck outside again. This time, when she came back in, she was a little frantic.
"Mom, its not moving," she said. Her cold breath hung in a cloud in the air between us. "Its just laying there and not moving." Tears filled her eyes as her voice started to tremble.
"OK, Let's go have a look."
I rushed out behind Sydney and climbed the stairs to the cage. I looked inside and saw the baby lying on its side in the cage. Its four legs stretched out in front of it, like a stuffed animal. My heart sunk. There was no movement, no breath, nothing. My thoughts went crazy. Oh my gosh. We have a dead baby rabbit. Its dead and Sydney is so sad. I don't know what to do. Can we save it? How do I help Syd handle her emotions? Thoughts blew through my mind like a class 5 hurricane.
Shooting from the hip, I was just positive the baby was dead, so I instructed Sydney to pick it up so we could prepare it for its final resting place. On the way into the house I saw its nose move, then its leg move, then a breath. Oh No! I thought. The bunny is alive and now we've touched it with human hands, we've removed it from its mother and I've really messed things up.
I rushed into the house and started googling "baby rabbit care" like crazy. I discovered that baby bunnies, rescued by humans have a 90% mortality rate. Even a professional wildlife rehabilitator only had a 30% success rate. They need all sorts of special care that can only be provided by a mommy rabbit. "Oh great," I thought, "I just signed this baby's death certificate."
Finally, we decided to take it back out to the cage, place it next to Pegasus and trust that Pegasus and "Bella" knew what to do. By this time all the kids are late for school, I'm kind of stressed out and Sydney is a sobbing mess. So I left Sydney home, to try and pull herself together, while I rushed the other kids to school. When I came home, the baby was on its feet but still motionless. Sydney and I sat down together, dried our tears and took several deep breaths. We committed to each other that we would leave nature up to the parents and be prepared for whatever happened after school.
Before I left to take Sydney to school, we took a final walk up to the cage. The bunny looked the same. Then we looked up to the birthing box and wondered it there were any other bunnies hiding inside.
Epilogue:
After school, the baby was moving but we still weren't sure exactly how to handle the situation. It definitely wouldn't survive another night in the cold, even if it survived the day. But we didn't know if we could put it back in the nest because we had touched it - wondering if it will contaminate any other bunnies that may be in there.
Sydney asked a neighbot to come over who raised bunnies as a child. She helped Sydney get Pegasus to nurse the black bunny and then checked the nest. There were 4 other rabbits in the box. FOUR. That's FIVE bunnies total. She estimated the bunnies were 1 or 2 weeks old. And we learned it was ok for us to put the black bunny back in the nest. The parent rabbits know our smell and its actually helpful for the bunnies to be held occassionally to learn how to deal with the stress of human handling so that they will be good pets.
Each day since then, the black bunny has progressed and is a happy, healthy bunny now.
