Oh boy...

Actually, I can't tell how many are boys yet. Just that there are five little wiggly rabbit kits, looks like they'll be various shades of brown, grey and maybe even white.

Yes, a second surprise litter.

What happened was... when I first got rabbits in May 2005 ( Blacky and Butterscotch) and July 2005 (Luna, Whazzit and Chocolate), I couldn't get the girls fixed, the new vet didn't do lady buns. I did get the gents fixed once they were old enough. Of course, this was right around the time when we found out that instead of having four female mini-rex rabbits (Blacky, Butterscotch, Luna, Whazzit) and one male mini-rex rabbit (Chocolate), we actually had three males (Butterscotch, Whazzit, Chocolate) and two females (Blacky, Luna). Then Blacky had five kits on October 9, 2005, just 28 days after the probable father, her "sister" Butterscotch, was neutralized.

I never did find homes for the kits, so we went from having five house rabbits to having ten, which worked out pretty well. Of the new kits, four were girls (Shadow, Dusk, Liquorice and Brownnose) and only one was a boy (Sidestripe). Sidestripe was strictly segregated from his sisters, his mother, and Luna once he reached three months old, with plans to send him in to be neutralized once he got a bit bigger.

I finally got around to doing this when Sidestripe was nine months old, and the good news is that I found out that the vet - we're back to the old vet, since the new vet left so the old vet came out of semi-retirement - at any rate, the new old vet will do lady bunnies, so I can take the ladies in to be given the order of the spade. The bad news is that Luna had escaped her cage and had an unknown amount of time alone with Sidestripe one morning just two weeks before Sidestripe was taken in to be neutralized. We didn't actually catch them playing six-legged bunny, so I fervently hoped that maybe we'd caught Luna before Sidestripe had been anything less than a perfect gentleman.

Around this time... I'd long promised my son Robert that we'd get him a gray rabbit, and lo and behold, when we were in picking up Sidestripe after his trip to the vet, we saw that a lovely charcoal grey kit appeared at the feed store (adjacent to the vet's office), couldn't be more than 5-6 weeks old. When we went to collect him the next day, I noticed a larger (say 10 weeks old) fawn-coloured rabbit on her own in a cage in the back. "Almost getting too big to sell, people only seem to want to buy baby rabbits," the shop owner tells me. "Oh... what happens to the rabbits you can't sell?" I ask innocently. "We eat them," was the whispered reply, so as not to upset Robert who was busy cuddling his promptly named Stonepaw. I was just about ill on the spot.

Fawn and Stonepaw came home with us bringing the rabbit population to twelve.

And exactly a week ago today, Saturday July 22nd, around noon, Luna gave birth to five kits.

So, seventeen buns it is.