Do you keep each buck by itself or a buck group together? At this point I've been dreaming of silver fox for years. Couldn't seem to find them in Northern Wisconsin. Rubens sounded big enough I wouldn't be getting brother and sister. Seems genetic diversity would be important. The other one I saw selling sounded like they only had a few, asking online who she should breed next? Are there any advantages to the does being pregnant together?
Each buck has his own space and there's generally only six of them. Although at the moment, there's seven bucks so one is over at the end of the big doe hutch. The bucks live in the 'buck hutch', it's about ten feet long, three feet deep and two levels. Each buck has a ledge or box to sit on, that increases the floor area. It also has piped in water so there's no water bottles to mess with. That's six doors to open when feeding, but when I tried making a feeding bin accessible from the outside, the feed just mildewed due to our high humidity. So feeding isn't as fast as it could be, but not dealing with water bottles makes it quicker. The bucks can visit each other through the wire walls and they seem pretty content. They pretty much have their own space and it doesn't change.
There is a big doe hutch of similar size to the buck hutch (ten feet long, three feet deep, two layers, three big doors on each layer) except it's not segmented into spaces on each layer. The bottom layer is all one big space at the moment with the upper level in one smaller space for the buck and the rest for does. That means everybun there can be fed by opening only three doors.
At the moment, the herd here consists of seven bucks, seventeen does and four babies. One doe is in the nesting hutch (rat proof with a dropped nesting area) with four babies, another doe is in the other side of the nesting hutch but hasn't had her litter yet. There's a wire wall between them so they don't wander into each other's spaces. There's two adult does over in the other rat proof nesting hutch, although that one has a standard nesting box so that's the last one used for nesting when there's multiple does expecting litters. Those two are going to get their tattoos and get shifted over to the doe herd in the next couple of days, then the doe that's with a buck will move into that nesting space.
With a breeding herd, there always seems to be bunnies shifting around depending on if they're expecting a litter or the babies are growing up. Having hutches that can be modified to suit the current needs of the herd is a good thing. We have walls which can be put into the big hutches to separate them into different sized spaces. One big hutch of two layers can be modified into one big hutch of six individual spaces. Each floor plate can come up so when the floor rots out, it's easy enough to replace the floor plates instead of the entire hutch. The floors always rot out first.
The numbers of bunnies in the herd vary between about fifteen to fifty five. When there's lots of bunnies, we have an additional side hutch of about three by six feet which is used. That can be segmented into two spaces if necessary or left as one bigger space. Hmm, there's the two big hutches with two layers, one double sided nesting hutch, one big single nesting hutch and an additional (not rat proof) hutch which can be used once the babies are about three months old and safe from rats. After that, we'd have to set up wire cages on sawhorses with a piece of tin roofing on top and with individual water bottles.
At the moment, only the big hutches have piped in water, I need to set up a water system for the accessory hutches. Depending on how many bunnies you hope to keep and how much the herd size will change, hutches that can be modified can be useful. Here's a link to the bunny hutches we have here and how they've evolved over time.
Hillside Farm Hawaii Bunny Hutches. They will probably move again in another year or two, not sure what the next incarnation of bunny hutches will look like. Also, these hutches are only suitable for a mild climate without a lot of large predators, you'll probably need some more predator protection? As well as weather protection, most likely.
Having does pregnant at the same time is good, so if something happens that one mother can't take care of the babies, there will be a foster mum available. Having them in the same spot, well, I'd not do that myself but it might work for others. Due to very limited genetics available to me, we keep strict pedigrees on all the buns so we have to know the parentage. Which is hard to do in a colony situation.
We started with a mother/son pair sold to me as a 'breeding pair' in 2009. That obviously wasn't going to work for very many generations, so three mostly unrelated pairs were brought in. We've pretty much been working with the same genetics ever since then, although twice we have gotten offspring back from one of our does who met up with a mainland buck. The coefficient of inbreeding is usually kept at less than 25% unless there's a special circumstance for otherwise.
I will need to check out that Painted Mountain corn. Our season is optimistically 80 days or so. Do you eat it green or just dried? I am also a rabbit newbie, looking to learn.
Thanks for your response, the conversation has been great.
