The bunnies stress me out

Here we go, round two with the bunnies. We went through this last summer as some of you might remember.

A couple days ago I found Astro under the trampoline with a small critter in his mouth.  Being the geriatric dog that he is, he couldn’t here me when I yelled for him to drop it.  He just stared at me as I ran towards him and eventually let it fall to the ground where it lay squirming.  I put him and the other dogs inside and went back to check out what he had and if it was still alive.

It was a baby bunny, on it’s back flopping around.  I knew that it was probably lame now, last year one of the bunnies had a broken back and while fine every other way, it couldn’t hop.  We took it to Ohio Wildlife rescue where they humanly put it to sleep.

But this bunny flopped over, and started moving slowly- it’s eyes were still closed so it couldn’t see where it was going.  I was relieved to see it could move all it’s legs.  I put it in a box and then made the boys come out to help me find the nest.  If I was smart I would have let Astro back out to show me where it was since he dug the bunny out of the nest.

I really didn’t think we would be able to find it, our yard isn’t small and it has a ton of good hiding places.  But I found it, dug down in and saw one more bunny, so I put this bunny back in and hoped for the best.

The next day I went to check out on it and there were a lot of flies around it.  I peaked in and my bunny was still alive but the other one didn’t appear to be moving.  I told Andy I thought it was dead because of the flies.  He said no, probably just from bunny poop.  He poked the 2nd bunny, it moved.  We rigged up the nest so we would be able to tell if the mama was coming back.  Two days later nothing had been moved.  I was starting to get concerned, not to mention I couldn’t let the dogs out without close supervision.

So today I dug into the nest again, both bunnies poked their heads out and twitched their noses at me.  I called for Andy, who really thought we should just let nature take its course, I mean there really are a lot of bunnies around here.  But I couldn’t leave them to die, and when he came and took a peak, he couldn’t resist them either. So he pulled them out and sure enough there was a dead bunny in there, with flies and maggots- yuck.  Our poor bunnies were happy to get out of there.  We called Ohio wildlife rescue and they said to bring them in, they would take care of them until they could go out on their own, probably in another week or two.

I don’t know what not so very smart bunny thinks it’s a good idea to have babies in a yard with a bunch of dogs but these bunnies need to to knock it off – it totally stresses me out.