We live in a rural area with a large backyard that is the home for several trees, bushes, shrubs, and flowers, as well as two dogs and one pot-bellied pig. Our yard is also the temporary home of uncountable visiting chipmunks, squirrels, birds, bats, toads, insects of every kind andà ??alasà ??rabbits.
For most of the year, rabbits of every size and age get water from our grass, food from our flowers and plants, shelter from our trees. Our playfully pacifistic dogs like to watch them, stalk them, and chase them, but the rabbits have always figured out how to escape. What they haven't figured out is how to build nests and take care of their young. And that presents our problem.
The gestation period for rabbits is about 30 days, and mother rabbits can mate the same day she delivers a litter of four to eight. Days before delivering her litter, the mother rabbit will usually prepare a nest, lining it with her own belly fur. She'll deliver the bunnies, and then hop away, perhaps to go to the store for a few items, off to visit friends, or to her job at the Bunny Emporium. Survival instinct has led mothers to seemingly abandon their nests, so as not to attract attention of predators, but will watch from afar and stop by in the early morning and late evening to nurse her babies, known as kits.
But rabbits being rabbits will build nests anywhere they like, often, protected by bushes, sometimes left in the open, where predators, including neighboring cats, find the young. A couple of times, bunnies built their nests in the outdoor dog house. Fortunately for them, the dogs don't use it because they have a 2,000 square foot air conditioned house that they allow humans to share.
Sometimes, because almost every kind of carnivore, including man, consider the timid, scared rabbits as a food source, the mother will never have the opportunity to return to the nest.
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