Oona Update

Here is little Oona at five weeks. She is really doing well. She is small, but feisty! I have moved her to the barn during the day. Her cage in the barn is much larger and I think she is less bored. Daytime temps have been very warm here this week (low 80s), but cool enough at night, that I still want to bring her in since she has no siblings to help keep her warm during the night.

She is beginning to eat pellets, hay, oats and other snippets of fruit or veggies that I have on hand. I am still feeding her a small amount of the Goats Milk Esbilac (about 10 cc) once a day, which she takes with relish! I am trying to get her to eat more solid foods.

It appears the GM Esbilac is the way to go. There have been no digestive issues so far. Feeding has gone much easier since I bought the assortment of nipples from the squirrel rescue folks. Here is a nipple that has become a favorite and works well for this age. I have been using it for about 10 days now.




It fits right on the end of a luer lock syringe. The kit I purchased had about 6 or 7 different nipples and syringes. Some of the nipples are really for newborn small mammals. Too tiny for this baby!







However, the syringe I liked the best when she was about 3 weeks old (and I would have used it sooner, if I had it then) was this silicone nipple:














This nipple was very easy for her to nurse from without taking in too much milk and aspirating. Sadly, it only lasted a few days before her voracious appetite and growing teeth damaged the nipple to point of uselessness. I would definitely try this nipple (a new one!) on a younger kit, probably one as young as a day or so. It's very soft and pliable, more so than the nipple above that I am using now.





While I am at it here, I have included photos of
Oona's parents: Samson's Nitro is her dad.
He is a bit special, coming all the way from Ontario, Canada when Leslie Samson visited here last March.






And Windsor Farm's Glissade, a fabulous
doe I got from Gail Smith last summer. I have
re-bred Glissade to Nitro and this time hope to
have a more successful outcome!









Here is a parting shot of Oona in the house with her pal Buddy, the Oriental Shorthair. This was taken about a week ago.

Hand Raising Baby Bunnies

Not easy. And not always successful. Sadly, when my doe Glissade kindled on September 13, there were only three babies. One was dead, one was questionable, and one looked pretty good. Within a day, the questionable baby had died. The 'pretty good' one was thriving. However, Glissade was a bit of panicky mom and kept jumping in and out of the nest box. I was worried she would injure her remaining baby. On top of that, she was overfeeding it to the point of bursting. By day two, I removed the remaining kit and brought it in to the house for safekeeping.

Single kits are difficult to keep alive. Being alone, they can chill easily. Being only one, it's hard to keep mom's milk supply up. At first that wasn't a problem. Mom had plenty of milk. Since I brought the kit in the house, I needed to bring it back out for feeding. Or bring the doe in for feeding. Since she was a little over zealous in the care department, I opted to bring her in and feed the baby in the house on my lap.

To get her milk to let down, I injected some Oxytocin. It works pretty well under these circumstances. Inject into the large leg muscle, wait a few minutes, put mom on her on her back and put baby to teat. If you only have one kit, it's good if you can move it around to stimulate a few more teats into milk production.

This method worked well for a few days. However, I could tell that after about a week, milk production was drastically reduced. Not surprising. Oxytocin doesn't create more milk, but causes milk to let down. If there were more kits to stimulate milk production, it wouldn't be a problem. By day 10, mom was pretty much out of milk.

I had a few options here, although having never done this before, I called a few folks who had. It seems everone I talked to had a slightly different recipe. Margie uses one with KMR (Kitten Milk Replacer), Pedialite and heavy cream. My friend Charlene suggested KMR for puppies, actually Esbilac for puppies. I liked the idea of goats milk although Margie mentioned not to use raw goats milk. She had an issue with kennel cough in the entire litter when she used it. It was from a local person who apparently had some contamination.

Initially I used the KMR and goats milk with a little heavy cream for calories. Now finding the perfect recipe is one thing; finding how to get them to take it is another. Thankfully this baby was strong. Really strong and really hungry. And by now it was not a brand new baby. I tried one of those kitten baby bottles. It worked okay, but the nipple was too hard and big. Then I used a 1 cc syringe. The baby could take it okay as long as I didn't drown it trying to push the formula through the syringe.

The problem was the 1 cc syringe. This baby was sucking this stuff down in no time flat and every time I had to stop and refill, took time. Also, while I was refilling the syringe, the kit lost it's feeding rythym. A few days later, my friend Alexis turned me on to Chris's Squirrels , a squirrel rehab site. They have some great nipples in all sorts of sizes.

I ordered this sample set. The one I like started with at day 17 was F, but put that nipple on the 10cc luer lock syringe. I also found some Esbilac Goat Milk Replacer on this website. Used for puppies that can't tolerate the Puppy Milk Replacer. Goat's milk is easier to digest, but does have less fat. I also found the goat milk replacer locally, so switched over to that.


Here is the baby at 17 days. She is small, but strong.


Today, she is now about 20 days old, I started adding some Esbilac Puppy Replacer to her Goats Milk replacer. She is taking in about 10 to 15 ccs per feeding. I have started feeding her twice a day now since she is acting starved. I have also put some thinly sliced apples and a little broccoli in her cage. She has a dish of King Feed rabbit pellets and some oats. A small dish of water is placed in her cage. Oh, and every day or other day, I give her a few ccs of yogurt.

And she has a name: Oona.


At this point, I don't even have to hold her for her to feed from the syringe. She takes this in about a minute.

She is almost three weeks old. She is starting to eat some hay, and she loves her apples and oats. I am hoping she will start on pellets soon.