Week 10 'bread pudding n ol blue eyes'

Bet that has everyone wondering lol :) well welcome to week 10 TSB's and a week it certainly has been...a few ups...but a few downs unfortunately....but as us breeders know there are certainly mixed moments in our sheds at times.
OK lets start...Friday was not one of the best days unfortunately as we had two deaths in the shed       :(   The first was a chocolate self doe called Symphany.

our little choc doe 'Symphany'

She was a lovely typey little doe who we had nearly lost once before when she was younger. Well we mated her up and she had a litter of 3 kitts which were unfortunately born dead, we had not re mated her as she seemed a little stressed when we took kits out....the next morning we found her dead :( so whether the stress of birthing caused it we are not sure but it does seem like it considering when she was ill as a youngster. Such a shame as she was a lovely little doe as can be seen.

The second death was one I had to do with unfortunately. My F1 Perlfee/Sib cross doe was getting very amorous with her babies so i mated her with our F1 Perlfee/Glav cross buck

Charlie the F1 perl/sib cross



Now this mating went fine, no problems.....when i put the the other pair together which was an opposite sex mating, the doe kept trying to mount the buck as well as forcing her head under him....i left them for a moment to bring a visitor down to see Kim and as they were still running around when i got back and there was fur every where i decided to take the doe out. When i looked at the buck he was sitting up cleaning himself but i could see traces of blood on the bedding...when i picked him up and turned him over my first thought was the doe had nicked his scrotum...unfortunately it was not....she had tore into him causing a large cut that allowed his intestines and bowel to come out....he was fine...i was distraught obviously but there was nothing i could do so had to have him put down straight away :( such a shame as he was such a striking rabbit.

I did have some good bits of news though our sooty fawn rabbit Bramble went and got him self a new home finally...had a phone call the evening before of a lady in Kent wondering if we still had him for sale as she wanted something with the Rufus gene in it so up she came, fell in love and took him.

'Bramble our mad dancing and spraying buck lol'

The weekend ended up being very busy Ellie our helper/student in the shed came over to help and ended up not only helping with the rabbits but also in our other shed of guinea pigs lol but i think she enjoyed it :) we gave her some homework a couple of weeks before and has made a very good start on it (we will show you the end result when its finished) :) While Ellie was with us, we had the 1st of our visitors...John and his daughter of Osirius Stud. What lovely people :) at the Essex Champs Kim had made some bread pudding for everyone (link to the title of this weeks blog) :) well John liked it so much that he asked cheekily if Kim would make a batch and they would pick it up. Well it was enormous lol around 3 inches deep and a foot square lol.....john also acquired one of Kims sour dough loaves as well. Anyway while they were here they came down to the shed to talk rabbits as we all do....and John took to the Hulstlanders straight away. I still had a pair left that i was hanging onto that was possibly going up to a lady in Yorkshire (see previous post) but having had no contact confirming she wanted them John asked if they were still for sale :) how can you say no lol so John ended up with an early fathers day present and i have my last Hulstlanders (ol blue eyes) gone to make room for our other breeds to spread out a bit now .

Mixed news now, one of our chocolate otter does was mated up to a chocolate otter buck and the result was 4 kit's.....3 chocolate otters...and 1 lilac self so understandably we are very happy....fingers crossed they will be fine as they keep leaving the nest and the weather keeps getting cold again, I'm sure they will be fine though but we keep checking anyway.

The other bit of mixed news is one of our new additions the little Lutino doe has suddenly gone down hill not eating and drinking and she has scoured :( we have dosed her up (thanks Mr Every :) ) but being she is so small we are of course very worried for her.

'Lilith our Lutino doe'

We will keep you all informed though :( anyway thats it really for this week...we have some shows to go to for week 11 so hopefully will have some pictures to put up and you guys may get to see an old favourite from Tarax Stud as one of our old rabbits may be coming along with someone else and entering the pet section :) fingers crossed. Before we go i have not had a rabbit of the week or product of the week so i am going to remedy that straight away lol.....

First an introduction to ....Silas

'Silas one of our main stud bucks'

Silas came to us through our very good friend and mentor Daren Morris....his a lively character totally loves attention (Silas....well Daren as well thinking about it lol)

 His colour is cinnamon which as you breeders out there know is basically chocolate agouti one of our fav colours. His small for his breed weighing around 3lb but very typey

Silas is also what is called prepotent which means what ever we mate him up to he will pass on more good points than bad...also known as heterozygous which means he doubles up on the good genes :)

His background is

sire - Ravel

dam - Seymour

dob - 22/11/11

matings in our shed to date - 18

So that's our boy Silas introduced to you :) as for product in the shed....well this came about because of Silas and Bramble mainly :) with spring been and gone it did have an effect in the shed with at least half of all our buck's whether mini lops, glavcots or Siberians (the Huls behaved themselves actually lol) spraying every time we walked through the shed...every time i cleaned out it seemed to be a competition on who could spray me the most....anyway i had enough and decided to remedy the problem, and its worked. First i added magnetic strips to the front of the hutches (one or two strips, top and bottom what ever you prefer)

I then did the same to some perspex sheeting which could be placed against the other strip

 by using two pieces of perspex you can adjust the gaping to allow a good air flow around the front

 then depending who your sprayers are you just move the the sheeting around instead of the bucks

'Simples' lol anyway it works for us and you dont get so much mess around the shed as you just take the sheets off, quick wipe down then you can look in on your favourite bucks with out getting a warm facial :) so that's it peoples week 10 finished look forward to next week and seeing what happens then so until then l8rs.













week 9 (week 8 got lost in the post)

Hello TS bloggers and welcome to week 9 in the exciting and riveting adventures of Tarax Stud Rabbitry :).
Now the more astute of you may of noticed a teensy weensy thing about this weeks blog and that is...week 8 seems to be missing....i'm not going to beat about the bush...i will tell it how it is....Kim lost it!! i had it all sorted out, a rough draft of everything, i had photo's, video clips, newspaper cuttings, i had 3 taped interviews from some top people in the rabbit world....i even had sky tv doing an interview for sky news to show you....it was all sitting on my desk ready to work on Monday evening last week....then Kim tided up and its gone....what can i say, the best blog any of you will ever get to see and read....and its lost....oh well never mind :)
Where were we...oh yes week 9 well after all the excitement of week 8 (you should of been there it was brilliant,,,,that escaped lion and our rabbit was amazing, and when the helicopter tried getting a shot at the lion it was so funny what happened next i couldn't stop laughing.....just goes to show how amazing rabbits are. Just glad the last bits of that Russian satellite have been taken away as they were a hazard with our dogs in the garden) this week has been a little quiet, we separated and sold a couple of our rabbits which is not unusual i hear you say but for me these particular rabbits were a little hard to say good bye to. The first were the Hulstlanders....because we need room in the shed for the Siberians and other projects in the shed i realised we needed to make space so i took the decision to move the Hulstlanders on. A lovely lady who i met through Trina took a buck and a doe :)

'Nij' our buck

 

''Tia' our doe

 

Next to go was Katrina our original doe and that left 3. Dillon our favourite buck had a buyer interested in him but changed their mind a couple of days ago, our last 2 Huls although i have advertised them all over the place still had no interest in them....until the show i went to on Sunday.

 

At the last Rare Varieties stock show in Colchester i got talking to the judge on the day (Mr Armstrong ) who was looking for some Huls for a young lady up in Yorkshire which i duly helped him with. On Sunday at the show i met with Mr Armstrong who told me that the same young lady had her shed broken into and her rabbits all let go...hutches were tipped over etc and what made it worse was that green paint was splashed over what ever rabbits did not run away. Understandably the girl and her son (who is autistic and adores the rabbits) were devastated....Steve asked if i had any Hulstlanders for sale again :) well how could we say no...Steve is going to check with the young lady if she would like the rabbits then its just a matter of getting them up to Yorkshire....which i just might have covered :)

 

'Nij' the last Buck

 'Jina' the last Doe

 

Its going to seem strange with no hulstlanders in the shed as such but we need to make room for the Siberians and the 2 other projects Kim has on the go :).

2 other rabbits that went last week were 2 of the lilac Siberian kits....as we had 3 bucks and 3 does we did not need all of them so we put rings on the ones we wanted, which was very hard as they all looked so similar.....

 

 

A lovely couple took the buck and the doe went a few days later to a gentleman we got to know from our web page :)

 

Other news in the shed are our 2 other litters born nearly 5 weeks ago. The first was our Golden Glavcot 'Fanny', this was her very 1st litter and she had 7 lol...3 glavcots and 4 browns

 

'Fanny and one of her daughters'

 1 of each of her litter

 

She has turned out to be a good mum but i think she has not quite got over the shock that these 7 kits are hers lol and runs away from them...a lot :) they have weaned already by the looks of it as they are all small for there age especially considering the litter in the hutch next to her who had their kits a day early.....and are easily twice as big :)

 

'Lillie' with one of her 2 large kit's :)



 

So that's it in the shed this week, our young helper Ellie was unfortunately ill over the weekend which meant she was not able to help out (and she missed all the fun with the lion and rabbit thing lol....though we are glad she didn't have to see the childish antics of that cameraman and Katie price on our front lawn of all places....just glad we had that paint remover on hand...)....lastly we went to Portsmouth to go to the Southern Champs, we didn't have any rabbits entered but it was nice to catch up with friends and also to pick a couple of rabbits up....something very new and unusual lol. It was a breed i had seen in a book about 12 years ago and never thought i would get to see one in the flesh let alone actually have a pair in the shed....there called  Lutino's

 and basically are a coloured rabbit but have pink eyes which are associated with white rabbits......

 at first i was not sure what to think about them but they are so striking (this is the buck)

 the doe is a lot smaller and a lot younger but again very striking in her appearance.

Kim and her fascination in colour genetics meant this was something she wanted to get her hands on (not that we don't need another colour/breed in the shed) and already her mind is working on the genetic background as well as what colours may work with the lutino colour. Reading up on what info is about it seems the colour was produced through harliquins. The rabbits vary from pale yellow to orange in colour, they have a creamy white to white belly colour and the eyes are obviously red...there is a variant that has a blueish colour running through it and this is known as a shadow (if i find some good pictures of it i will put them up.....exciting a guys :) anyway we will let them rest and as new stuff happens we will of course keep you all up to date.

 

Anyway i'm going to finish there, Kim's mentioned that theres still a piece of satellite sticking up out of one of the flower beds so i had better sort that out. hope you enjoyed this weeks blog people and if we ever come across week 8 we will of course....put it up ;) l8rs people.

week 7 and as usual its late again!

Evening mid week bloggers :) I know its late ...again but i get distracted lol I will catch up...I promise :)

Anyway week 7 went off really well :) we had some boarders stay with us mid week, who were originally from us a few months ago. Paul purchased 2 rabbits from us but brought one back because it was chasing the other rabbit so much. He ended up with a choc tort doe and an orange butterfly buck, so it was very nice to see them back here for a week. Paul admitted he was finding it hard to look after 2 rabbits and expressed that he would like to find a new home for the choc tort doe when he got back from his holiday. I didn't think much of that conversation until a few days later :)
The weekend saw a young lady called Ellie come to the rabbitry to help with various chores around the place (mainly cleaning out of hutches etc.) We hope she enjoyed her time with us as I know she has her own animals she looks after but Kim is treating it as a work experience project and is also going to organise some NVQ style work sheets for Ellie to use for her CV :)  The idea is that Ellie works in each area (rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens and bee's) with not just cleaning but looking at animal husbandry as well, so exciting for us just as much for her :)

In the shed the rabbits are coming along in leaps and bounds the lilac Siberians are doing very well

 

Trevor Lilac Siberian sire

 

Vivianne Lilac Sib Doe 

 

6 kits born

 

all look exactly the same lol

one of the does 



                        and one of the bucks

 

Whats good is that we have an even split of gender 3 bucks and 3 does which we are really pleased about :) 1 of the bucks has already a new home with a couple picking up a buck this week.....the others are harder to choose as they are so similar lol. Asking the advice of some fellow Siberian breeders we think we have chosen 2 bucks and 2 does which we will put to one side and see how they progress :) i suppose its watch this space lol.

 

Our other litter which we have been excited about is the argentes, this is a genetics programme Kim is playing with (when doesn't she play with colour genetics lol). Anyway mum has mellowed slightly since the babies which is good :) the kits are quite striking already with 4 oranges and 2 agouti's

 

Argente dam 'Princess' 

 

some of the Argente F1's at 4 weeks old

 

 and at the moment very cute









Just waiting now to see if any ticking starts which listening to other argente breeders usually starts around 8 weeks :) so again very excited. The last litter in the rabbitry are our Perlfees

 

The Perlfee's 

 

                                                      Pelfee 'Charlie' with her 4 kits



 

So that's it with the litters so far, we do have some younger litters as mentioned last week but will save them for when they are old enough :) the only other piece of news is that we have decided to give up breeding our Hulstlander due to needing the space  so we will let you know how we get on with that on our next blog.

Rabbit of the week will also be saved until the next blog as well as item in the shed....due to this blog being so late. We have a 3 day fair this weekend so will be back on as soon as possible hope you all understand :) so until then l8rs TS bloggers.