Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

We have been unable to take a further look at our ten newly arrived rabbit kittens today as their mum, Waffle, has buried them really far down in a tunnel of straw which is so close to the door of her nesting compartment that if we open it, the babies will all come tumbling out!! Waffle spent most of the morning gathering more bits of straw for the nest (as demonstrating here) so we just left her to it. We have been speculating what colours the kittens will be: although Waffles' mum was brown, both she and our male are white so it's likely all the young will be too. The whole idea of adults passing on their physical appearance to their offspring is fascinating. For a great many animals, including humans, physical characteristics are passed on (do you look like your mum or your dad?). BUT not always... the dairy goat kids usually look like their mums or their dads but the pygmy goats can be totally different!! Friends of ours who have bred pygmy goats for over 30 years say that they have never seen physical characteristics passed on in any regular way. And our own three years of breeding supports this. When it comes to the actual 'character' of the offspring though, we do see patterns... we must explore this idea further another day...
Our tiny duckling has spent a lot of time outside with mum and siblings today and managed to keep up, helped a lot we are sure by the fact Orange has not really wandered that far. The wobbly chicken indoors is still wobbly, but a little less so and our latest broodies and their chicks are all doing really well... It is nice to have a break from actual births for a few days and enjoy what we have. The next sets are due in a week: more ducks and our quail.
And we end with Victoria seen here in the other two photos squeezed into one of the chicken nestboxes (her choice, we did not sandwich her in there, honest...). She is broody bless her but we don't want to give her any eggs. We keep taking her out and she keeps putting herself back - we cannot quite think how she gets in, as the last photo shows, her back end sticks out as the box really is too small!! We may need to take her out of the poultry area for a while so she breaks the habit!!!