In encounters between the sexes, a female may at first face off in a threat posture and strike out at a male with her forepaws.
As courtship proceeds, the two sexes may jump over one another, or one rabbit may leap into the air while the other darts beneath it. Breeding occurs from late March into August and September; during that span, a healthy female may produce several litters of young. Before giving birth, a mother cottontail makes a nest by digging a depression in the ground about 5 inches wide and 4 inches deep.
She lines the depression with grass and fur from her body, then adds a covering of twigs and leaves. Nests are built at night, in brush or among dense vegetation on the forest floor.
After a roughly four-week gestation period, the mother gives birth in the nest. Sometimes people confuse this behavior if it is witnessed with cannibalism. Sadly, if the father of the babies is much larger than the female, she could be inadvertently injuring the kits, which are too large for her birth canal, while attempting to free them.
Seek immediate veterinary intervention should this be happening. The mother's life is in danger, as well as the lives of the babies. If the mother rabbit has died, cannot or is not feeding the babies, you can attempt to hand feeding them.
Bottle-feeding infant rabbits usually culminates in the babies' death within a few days to weeks. If the room is cooler, then you may place a heating pad on a low setting under no more than HALF of the nest so the bunny can move to a cooler area if it gets too warm. If this is a wild rabbit, handle it ONLY when during feedings as excessive handling can be extremely stressful and potentially fatal.
You can also use Regular Goats Milk found in the carton at your local grocery store. The following is a guideline for the daily amount to feed a wild bunny or a domestic bunny. Domestics are weaned about 6 weeks; wild bunnies are weaned about weeks for cottontails, and weeks for jack rabbits. Do not use Esbilac for wild rabbits as we found they do not do well on that. It is okay for domestics. These small ones if eyes closed all need to be stimulated to urinate and defecate prior to and following feeding.
Except Jack Rabbits do not. This can be done by gently running a wet cotton ball warm water over the urogenital area. All orphans with open eyes should be offered rolled oats, whole oats also for wild ones , commercial rabbit pellets, leafy alfalfa, clover, dandelion greens, and some leafy greens. The idea is to offer a variety. Some formula may also be placed in a stable dish to encourage self-feeding but discard in a hour or so if not eaten.
If you have a healthy adult rabbit at home and you can collect cecotropes the soft green droppings that the rabbit usually eats then these can be mixed with the KMR to give the baby bunny normal bacteria for its intestinal tract. Only one cecotrope per day for days is needed. This is particularly important for rabbits under one week of age. Also good is to sprinkle acidophilus powder from human capsules in the milk a little each time for healthy flora.
After each feeding it is important to make the bunny defecate and urinate to keep the intestinal tract and urinary system running smoothly only until their eyes are open.
No need to do this for jack rabbits; they go on their own. Use a cotton ball moistened with warm water and gently stroke the anal area until the bunny starts producing stool and urine and keep stroking until the bunny stops. You are reproducing the behavior of the mother rabbit who would lick her young to stimulate them to go to the bathroom and to keep the nest clean.
The stool will be soft and may be varying shades of green and yellow. As soon their eyes are open, you may introduce the bunnies to hay, such as oat hay, alfalfa and timothy, and dark leafy veggies such as carrot tops, parsley, dandelion, romaine, collards, Swiss chard, apple for wild ones , etc. Dandelion greens are extremely important for jack rabbits.
If this is a wild rabbit, you do not need to introduce them to pellets. If this is a domestic rabbit baby, then you may introduce them to pellets at 2 weeks of age please refer to the handout Care of Rabbits for more information on diet.
Wild rabbits should be released as soon as they are eating hay and greens and are approximately 5 inches in body length cottontails. They will be small, but the longer you keep them, the more agitated and difficult to handle they will become and the less likely their chances for survival in the wild. Release ONLY at dusk or dawn. Jack rabbits will be much larger and are released after 9 weeks when ready.
Most notably, about 44 percent of cottontail rabbits die in their first month of life, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation. Only 20 percent to 25 percent live for a year after birth. That means many rabbits never produce offspring of their own.
One reason rabbits have become infamous for their ability to produce so many offspring may be because of a well-known math problem involving the Fibonacci sequence that dates back to , according to Live Science. In a book on mathematics, mathematician Leonardo Pisano Bigollo, who later came to be known as Leonardo Fibonacci, posed a brain-teasing question along these lines: A male and a female rabbit are placed in an enclosed area. After a month, they mature and produce a litter with one male and one female.
That pair then goes on to have another litter and so on. After a year, how many rabbits would you have? The formula used to derive the answer is called the Fibonacci sequence, and the rabbit problem is well-known and still used in math texts today. The answer to the question posited by Fibonacci is rabbits would be produced in one year based on the scenario presented, Live Science reports.
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