All my does were due to kindle today, but Bluefin was the only one who came through on time. Since there has been some fur pulling from the other girls I expect there will be more full nestboxes tomorrow. In the meantime, Bluefin had a bit of strange litter.

Bluefin was bred to Scorch this time around, a first for her. She kindled nine healthy kits, all of which look to be blues or blacks. Since she doesn’t build the greatest of nests, I decided to fix it up a bit after I saw the babies had all arrived. I didn’t want them to end up at the bottom of the wire with no insulation underneath them.

As I was counting them, I noticed a bit of bloody bedding and placenta at the bottom of the nest. This is totally normal and I went to clean it out. I was surprised to see that it was not just placenta, but two amniotic sacs with two tiny, perfectly-formed bunnies inside. They were both about 1.5 inches long, and actually looked very peaceful, as though they were sleeping.

I have had kits born dead, but they’ve never looked like this. These babies look like they just haven’t had enough gestation time. It occurred to me that rabbits are supposed to be able to get pregnant twice at the same time, since they have two uterine horns. How could this have happened? Well, she had her previous litter of kits in with her until they were ten weeks old.

Ten weeks is super early for a rabbit to sire kits, and I never noticed any funny business going on, but could this be what occurred? If so, it looks like I’m going to have to start separating kits out even sooner.