Expectant Does

               The Chinchilla doe is resting after overhauling the newspapers in her nest box.

We purposefully made the nest box of the Chinchilla doe slightly bigger because she is bigger in size than the Cinnamon doe. We put in the nest box inside the cage on the 28th day after breeding and that is today, the 16th of August. Knowing this, we made some preparations for the delivery and we cut up a lot of old newspapers into 1/2 inch strips and used these as a litter to line up the bottom of the nest boxes. The litter came up to about four inches from the wire bottom. Then we cut up a cardboard box that would fit outside the wire bottom of the next boxes. This will serve as a cover against any down draft coming from the floor of the all-wire cages. It would be easy to change the cardboard at the bottom of the wire box once it gets dirty. All we need to do is to lift up the nest box and change the cardboard underneath where it was sitting on since the cardboard is not attached to the bottom. When everything was ready, we put each nest box inside their individual cages. The two does didn't know what to make of their nest box at first and they started chewing on the wood. Then they got inside their individual nest box and started to dig in and brought everything out! What are we going to do now?

                       This is the Cinnamon doe resting after she re-arranged her nest box.

We were observing them as this is our first time to raise rabbits. When they got tired of jumping in and out of their nest box, they would take a rest and would stretch out to their full length on the wire floor right next to their iced-water bottle. Then after a few minutes, they would go back inside the nest box again and would bury themselves in the newspaper cuttings and they would continue to dig. After some time, they came out of their nest box and we noticed that they were gathering the newspapers in their mouth that were strewn all over and they were putting them back inside the nest box! They were rearranging the newspapers in the nest box the way they wanted it done! So don't try to rearrange their nest, just let them do as they please because they know best what they want and how they want their beds done. To us newbies, we thought that was really amazing because we've never seen rabbits making their nest before. The size of the nest box that we gave them was really perfect for each of them. They can turn around inside and they could get in and out of it easily as well. So now it’s just a wait and see because they can give birth within two days after putting in the nest box or any day and anytime from now.