Wildie Wednesday

The introduction of two new Duchy Farm kennels which provide housing for some of our special needs rabbits, has led to some additional rabbit proofing of one of our binky areas.

I don't think these three are that pleased about it though....

From Start To Finish

Did I ever tell you the story of how this blog came about? Oh right, I sort of did. Well...forget about that. Let me tell you again.

I arrived at the RRR back in February of 2008. I was looking for a pair of bunnies to adopt but, knowing nothing about rabbits, I wanted to volunteer for a few weekends to make sure bunnies were for me. Well, of course, they were. My only previous experience of volunteering was the odd Xmas party for senior citizens or bits and pieces for schools when I was younger. I was completely new to animal rescue volunteering but after just one afternoon I was hooked. For the first time in my life since I had left the teaching profession, my life felt like it had a deeper meaning.

Harrison, brother of Whisky

I had an image in my head of what I expected bunnies to be from a few photos I'd seen of cute bunnies on websites and was not expecting the vast variety of breeds I encountered at the Rescue. Having only experienced cats and dogs in my own family it also took me a while to understand their personalities. The first bunnies I met at the RRR that I fell for were a pair of brothers that resembled the image I had in my head - Whisky and Harrison. They were not together as a pair though as they had been separated ready to find wives and I was a few months off building my outdoor rabbit accommodation anyway so I didn't consider them a realistic option regardless.

Santa and Jemima at the RRR

Eventually I did adopt a wonderful pair:- Santa and Jemima. Neither red-eyed-whites nor Rexes had appealed to me initially, but once I'd got to know them I wasn't so worried about their breed, it was all about their personality. They quickly became the most important part of my life and I loved them dearly. To me they were like children, so much so that my girlfriend of the time told me later that this was one of the reasons she left me - the fatherly love I showed them dwarfed any emotion I had ever shown towards her. Plus, she was continually frustrated at my repeatedly cancelling any plans we had at the slightest sniff that one of them might be unwell.

My enthusiasm for my bunnies was evident to anyone who ever asked about them. Like any excited parent, I could talk about them for hours. They made me laugh every day with their silly antics and I would enjoy just watching them go about their rabbity business. The trouble was, outside of the Rescue, few people I knew were interested in rabbits, so my stories of Santa and Jemima's adventures would be bottled up and explode out of me in long tales rambled at Caroline on a Saturday. Whilst she was happy to hear about them, I think it was probably a bit much and didn't help productivity on those days, so perhaps that's why she encouraged me to start a blog about it. We decided it would be good to have a mix of my own rabbits stories and those of the bunnies at the Rescue and so "Big Ears, Tiny Tales" was born.

Did you ever wonder why our URL was always bunniestotherescue when the blog is called Big Ears, Tiny Tales? When I was setting it up I had come up with three possible titles. As well as the one we ended up with, I floated "Bunnies To The Rescue" and "Chompin' At The Savoy" (a reference to an old jazz tune). There was no real preference expressed by the others in the team, so in the end I picked bunniestotherescue for the simple reason that I thought it was easier to pick out the words from the URL. I created the blog that way, but after a while the name "Big Ears, Tiny Tales" grew on me so much that I decided that was definitely the one. I guess I could have changed it to bigearstinytales, I probably should have, but it just didn't look right so I left it. And there you have it - soon it was linked from our website and referenced all over so it was too late.

Sushi in my garden, 2012. Why? No reason. Except otherwise you'd be looking at too many paragraphs of text right about now, so...

In the early days, there were three blogs featuring rabbits that I read regularly. The first was the My House Rabbit blog. It was sort of a mix of what the rabbits in the author's family got up to with some hints and tips, care advice and general rabbit-related world news. Then there was Cute Overload, a general animal blog of cute photos with captions and short articles, it was a great site which both chronicled the evolution of cuteness on the web and directed it. Finally was the supreme king of all bunny blogs, Disapproving Rabbits. This was a simple "one photo with caption" daily blog, but the captions were so tremendously well written, often with references to literature and culture, it was regularly laugh-out-loud hilarious. This was the blog landscape I tried to fit Big Ears, Tiny Tales into (OK, I'm gonna call it BETT from this point on), but while it took some inspiration from those other blogs it remained very much its own thing - a (sometimes humorous) chronicle of the goings on at a UK rabbit rescue as well as my personal experiences of living with rabbits at home.

From the start, I had intended for the blog to be a group effort. Whilst I was to take the lead and likely be the most regular contributor, I set it up for a number of the volunteers, including Caroline, to be able to post. Whilst they were as enthusiastic as I was about having the blog, they rarely found time to write anything for it. Apart from a few times when I took breaks for work trips or when one of my fluffy family passed away and I couldn't bring myself to write about the joy of rabbits, the rest of the team pretty much left me to it.

Colin, former volunteer and MD of the charity. (Only managed to write one post on the blog, but could always find time to share an apple with his favourite trio.)

The biggest change to BETT began in April 2012. I had been reading up on how to improve the blog and one of the most important pieces of advice that I found was that the blog should have regularly scheduled posts - if you want people to keep coming back, they need to know when to expect new tales. Around this time a number of other exciting rabbit blogs had emerged: Speedy the House Rabbit, The Zen of Bun, Two Bunny Blog, A Houseful of Rabbits. They were all great blogs, but Disapproving Rabbits was still ahead of them in two very important ways: Firstly it was daily - DR readers were returning every morning to see the latest disapproving face and read the hilariously fitting caption over their morning coffee/commute. Secondly, because it was driven by reader photo submissions, it had an infinite variety of stars. This was something the other blogs, generally based on the handful of rabbits in peoples own families, couldn't match. It occurred to me that here, with RRR being possibly the single biggest rabbit rescue in the UK and with a constant turnover of residents, we had something bloggable that no one else could match. As well as a large cast of long-term characters, we had a rolling line of new and interesting faces with their own stories to tell. So that was it - I decided to give it a go and on 20th April 2012 BETT became a daily blog.

I figured I would run BETT daily for a while and see how it went. The first month was exciting as I started to learn new skills of listening to what our residents had to say and interpreting them for the blog. The photo part came easy, I was already taking sometimes over a hundred photos in a week trying to get good shots for the website and other things. The harder parts to it seemed to be rearranging the funny things the residents said to end on a punchline (bunnies don't always deliver their gags in human-friendly form) and editing down the words into the shortest possible way of reaching that punchline. Again, there was often a not-surprising amount of fluff and build-up the way they told it. Sometimes it even needed a complete re-write to deliver their hilarity in a way that made sense in a few frames and lines - lots of Googling literary references, quotes and the like. In fact, another surprisingly difficult thing was coming up with a title for each post.

To make things harder on myself, I even set some rules to follow for the titles:

• Never repeat a title
• They should always favour puns (to match the style of the blog's title)
• Where possible, the post title should be a pun on, or reference to, the title of a movie, song, book etc.

It's the sort of thing that starts out OK but just keeps getting harder as time goes on. You'll see this gradually being abandoned (to a degree) over time if you look back through the old posts, though I hope we never repeated a title. But perhaps if you hadn't realised about the movie/song thing you can have fun trying to spot them all! As time went on, we also had song lyrics, movie stars names etc.

Whisky in the garden, 2012

One thing that did make the blog much easier to maintain was that, by the time it became daily, Whisky had moved into my house and become properly part of my family. Living with a house bunny with as much energy and character as Whisky had, I could never run out of tales to tell. Sure, he had a lot of medical things going on for the whole of his life to talk about, but mostly he was just a bunny who enjoyed himself and provided unlimited entertainment for anyone who witnessed it. He could have had his own daily blog and filled it if he'd wanted to, but his Sunday posts seemed a good balance of sharing his life and letting him get on with it. He naturally has more posts currently than any other bunny on this blog, as a result of those weekly updates, and I've been told was considered the heart of it by many of our readers. When Whisky died last December, I had to consider if I could continue BETT without him. Fundamentally though, this blog is for the bunnies of the RRR to communicate their thoughts to the world and thankfully Pandoren stepped in to keep it going.

Pandoren was the Animal Care Assistant employed to run the day-to-day workings of the RRR, as well as having been a weekend volunteer for some time, she was the natural choice and she seemed to enjoy it. Having myself dropped down to just two days a month regular volunteering, I was hoping to hand it over to her completely at that point, but it didn't work out. Maintaining a daily blog is quite a commitment for someone who regularly works long days like the ACA does, so with no one else on the team able to spare the time to contribute I filled the days on the blog she couldn't cover. When Caroline left the Rescue to pursue a different life for herself, Pandoren stepped up to become manager so she had even less time, though she continued to post when she could, but it meant again I took responsibility for the daily posting. Things changed again at the Rescue over the summer, with Caroline back and her family heavily involved in the daily running of the site, Pandoren felt it impractical for her to continue in the management post and gave notice. While she enjoyed a final blast of posts during her last weeks, again it fell to me to continue BETT on her departure.

Mars, October 2016

One thing I must say about the blog, which has jumped into my head quite randomly as I am writing here, is that it is highly valued by all the volunteers at the Rescue. Mainly because we have terrible memories and without it we'd struggle to remember who all Mars' husbuns were.

With all the changes and improvements this year, there is now a new and very capable team running RRR, headed by Caroline and a few very dedicated volunteers and ACAs. It seems to me that, if ever there was going to be one, now is the right time for me to move on. You probably guessed that was coming from the length of this post, right?! It's not that I am breaking all ties with the Rescue (I can't - Sprat still sends me messages demanding treats - he really does!), but for now I am off the regular volunteer rota and my previous responsibilities for the Rescue are covered by others in the new team. It has been a long and educational ride being a big part of RRR and running BETT and, despite all the drama, challenges and tragedies, a mostly enjoyable one.

I have one last post lined up for tomorrow before I depart, but besides that this is a 'goodbye' from me. At least for now. I hope you have enjoyed my posts here on BETT, I have certainly enjoyed and appreciated your comments and support over the years. I wish you all the best for the future and leave you (starting Tuesday) in the capable hands of one of the most dedicated volunteers I have met at RRR...but I will let her introduce herself!

Love and peace (and bunnies, always bunnies), BHV.

Oh, and if you start to miss me, don't forget you can always pop over to my other blog and leave me a comment!

Head Brush

You've seen nothing until you've seen a wild rabbit brush a siblings fur with a piece of dill.

A Grater Happiness

Wild Demands

"You realise we can see that wheelbarrow from here, right? Come on, cough up the rest of it."

April Offer

Check out this special offer at the RRR this month!

:-D

A Little Behind

I've taken so many photographs of our wild trio but they have a tendency to sit nicely at a distance too far for my poor little phone to pick up very well or to blur a lot, so I haven't been able to feature them as much as I'd like to! I did, however, manage to sneak up on a little bun I suspect to be one of the girls.

Not the best view mind you... and it did give me flash-backs to B-HV's Last Tuesday Tail...

"Let me get this straight... You FINALLY managed to take a photograph in focus and you took a picture of my BOTTOM?!"

Bolder Dash

I don't know what has been happening in my absence, or whether the weather is just making bunnies more eager for food to fatten up for winter insulation, but many of the usually cautious bunnies were uncharacteristically bold today. Some who would normally hide or keep a safe distance were racing towards me demanding food.

My favourites were Pea, Pod and Cosmos. Sure, they have often taken treats from my hand, but today they actually FOLLOWED ME ROUND while I fed their neighbours, pretty much demanding their breakfast! It was both sweet and hilarious!

"You know what's hilarious? We get to eat the tasty food, while you humans get to clean out our litter trays. Enjoy!"

Wild Beasts

While we the humans didn't do anything special for Halloween down at the rescue, it seems that some of the rabbits got into the spirit of things that day...

A pair of wild beasts appeared before me, their eyes red with the blood of their victims! (Now that I think about it, where did that new volunteer go?) I was almost tempted to check to see if their nice grass-nomming little teeth had turned more decidedly long and pointy...

"What? I haven't GOT any teeth... and you pressed the wrong button on your camera, silly human! Now stop waving that thing in my face and bring me my dinner!"

Tuesday Tail #52

The proportion of my recent Pea/Pod/Cosmos photos that are of them hoofing off in the opposite direction probably has something to do with my involvement in moving them out of their old setup and also being the one who picked them up for health checks and vet visits several weeks in a row. At breakfast I am now generally glared at, even if it is through begrudgingly grateful parsley nommage.

I am hoping it will pass in a few more weeks of no handling, but in the meantime, during outdoor playtime I am getting no shortage of photos for our Tuesday Tail feature...

"See ya!"

Tuesday Tail #50

Talkin' On Sunshine

"Sunshine, space, grass, what more could a bunny want?!"

Tuesday Tail #48

Quite some time ago we noticed Pea had a slightly snotty nose. Except of course we didn't know it was Pea at the time, since we have still not persuaded them to wear little hats with their names on.

Well anyway, being one of the hand-reared "wild" bunch, Caroline was reluctant to put her through the trauma of trips to the vets and having antibiotics. Much as they have grown up into happy domesticated rabbits who enjoy the luxuries of being waited on by humans, that all goes away the moment you try and pick one of them up for health checks. They'll happily hang out with you on the grass doing their thing while you eat lunch, they'll come right up and take food out of your hands if you have any they like, but come health check day they will run up the walls as if their tails were on fire to get away from those very same hands.

Unfortunately, the snot got worse and became so significant you could hear her breathing from the next enclosure over. We clearly couldn't leave it, but catching and medicating her daily while they were living in their fancy Runaround enclosure wasn't going to work. So a little over a week ago, we bit the bullet and moved them into one of our SNUs. It means slightly less space when they are shut in, but unlike their previous house the whole thing is under a roof so they can still use it all in bad weather and of course they are now much easier to catch without causing them stress. Their new house also has slightly more adjoining outdoor space for playtime, although they do have to time-share that space with a few of our permanent pairs.

They were understandably miffed when we first moved them, but looking at them now I'm pretty sure they are over it...

Goofy

Very sadly, our dear little Goofy has passed away.

Pea, Pod, Cosmos and Goofy were a litter of four wild rabbits found by a grounds worker when their warren was inadvertently destroyed. With their mother either killed in the process or having no chance to find them again, they were taken in and hand reared from tiny babies by the kind grounds worker before being handed over to the Rescue. Two boys and two girls, initially they seemed flighty and were housed in our old barn while we decided what to do with them, but after the stress of moving to the Rescue subsided, it soon became clear that they were not good candidates for release. Not only had three of them become pretty domesticated, but one had also somehow managed to lose their front teeth. And so they became permanent residents.

Despite their domestication, they always maintained a degree of wild behaviours. More than any other rabbits at the Rescue, they would enthusiastically dig deep burrows in their enclosure, dig out if not 100 percent enclosed and ferociously challenge through the mesh fence any rabbit appearing at their perimeter. Despite this, when out to play they would be absolutely good as gold when it came to home time and at the sound of the snack bucket would all race back in for their tea or treats!

Because of their wild energy, they had a fabulous Runaround system built around their shed and run to give more of a warreny feel to their home. After putting it in they seemed to be a lot happier and less mischievous, but the the week the new setup was due to go in was a challenge. Goofy was the one of the four that never completely trusted us humans, so sensing change was afoot, he decided to hide out. It turned out they had constructed a deep underground burrow under their run, having dug down through a tiny gap in the slabs. He stayed hidden for around a week, surfacing only to eat and drink when no humans were around. It was a very stressful time until we caught him outside one day and managed to block off the entrance to their underground tunnels. Fortunately he and his siblings didn't seem to mind once they found the new overground tunnels and extra chambers we put in for them!

Their willingness to attend mealtimes together when the food was delivered varied over time. I suspect it has been part seasonal ("Yeah, whatever, you missed active snackytime, it's naptime now, you know?") and part to do with what strange people were stomping around the Rescue at the time. Sometimes four would appear, sometimes none, or any combination in between. If I didn't see them all at the bowl, I would always seek them out (they would usually be found flaked out sunning themselves in plain sight behind the mesh of some part of their house or other) and hand-feed them a couple of pellets or parsley pieces to make sure they were all OK. Goofy sometimes found this individual attention just a little too much and would usually go sit in a tunnel until I'd moved on, but if the other three rushed to the bowl he would usually follow.

I was at the Rescue Friday afternoon/evening last week, doing a little sweeping, cleaning and dinner. It has been a while since I've seen all four at breakfast (I mostly do mornings and breakfast), so I was delighted when they all appeared for their dinner. Of course, I couldn't resist taking a photo, which is the one you see above, and though it didn't come out all that well it will now be very special to me as my last one of the whole group. In case you hadn't already guessed, that's almost certainly Goofy off to the right eating his pellets inside the shed. It makes me very sad to think I'll never see all four of them together at mealtimes again, but I feel very privileged to have experienced so many mealtimes with Goofy over the years and glad that he allowed me to have that one last one.

Eleanor was feeding everybun yesterday (Monday) evening when she discovered Goofy had passed away. We don't know what the cause was yet, but several of the volunteers have pitched in to pay for a postmortem to be carried out in the next few days, not only for peace of mind but so we can be sure for the other three in case of any infection.

You were a very special and dear little boy who lives in all our hearts. Binky free precious Goofy.

Width Restricted

"I was going to ask you to follow me down the rabbit hole, but looking at the pounds you've gained from all that Easter chocolate, I'm not even sure you'd fit through the doorway of our shed anymore."

Weekend at Bunnies

"Right then, there's the door, out you go. I'm afraid the only humans welcome at this party are those who remembered to bring enough carrotini for everybun."

The Three Stages of Happiness

Happy...

...happier...

...happiest.

A Seconds Hope

Too Early For Xmas Hats?

"Less than a month to Xmas now, have you decided what you are going to get us? Those hats with our names on you promised might be nice, so you can tell us apart and won't have to keep tagging us ALL in these blog posts."

"And if you're worried about me chomping holes for my ears, look, I could totally wear mine with my ears down!"

The Double-Headed Peek-Out