The rain continues, which is really abbynormal for us, usually we get rain and then sun and rainbows. The continuing rain is mostly gray gloomy days. So, what to do with gloomy days? Shear bunnies, of course! The continuing rain seems to have made some of the bunny fluff more clumpy than fluffy, but it can still be washed and used to make yarn after it's clipped off the bunny.
The rain has also kinda kept the bunnies damp so there's a bit of wool clumping on his face. There was a bit of webbing in his wool down near the skin. That's kinda unusual, although I'm not sure if that can be attributed to the weather or not. I'll have to watch and see what his next coat looks like.
This is Hillside Phineus Phogge before his haircut, as if that's not obvious. The picture is of his nose and face, although it's a bit hard to see because of the amount of wool on him. He hasn't had much if any grooming since his last wool harvest, right about now is when it would start clumping and matting, but since we harvest it all off, that deletes the need for grooming for quite some time. This is also something the bunnies have been selected for, easy maintenance coats. It would be entirely different with a show bunny, though.
When shearing a bunny, the first thing we do is inspect the condition of the coat and see where he is on the next layer growing in. On Phin's coat, the next layer was just finishing it's growing out so it's a good time to shear the coat off instead of plucking it off. He's also got a very dense coat so plucking would have taken forever.
Usually the first spot we start shearing is the top of the back. The beginning is digging down to the skin, laying the wool over so the wool can be cut off near the skin. The whole purpose of this is to get long lengths of fiber so it can be spun into yarn. It has nothing to do with having a good looking bunny afterwards. Since their wool grows so quickly, it doesn't really matter if they don't look that good afterwards.
He may not look very pretty, but he now weighs seven ounces less than when he started. Seven ounces is a respectable wool harvest for an English angora. Some of the other breeds have much larger harvests, although we like to think that 0the English fiber is softer. Which it is supposed to be. Partly because of less guard hairs and more underfluff hairs. Which also means that although the yarn produced is the softest, it also doesn't have the crazy halo some angora yarn has. It does get a halo, though. A soft one to match the rest of the English fiber qualities.
Other than getting a haircut, Phineus also got a bit of preventive Ivermectin in his ears, toenail clipping and he got weighed. That's all a pretty standard procedure during grooming. Phineus was weighed AFTER his wool harvest and he still weighed six pounds, six ounces. Which is a good size for an English Angora.
Hillside Zeus also got a haircut. He's taken up sticking his face on his water bottle spigot. I'm not sure why, but it makes his nose dirty and clumps the fibers on his face.
White bunnies are more susceptable to showing dirt than the colored bunnies. But still! Sticking one's nose on the water bottle spigot is not recommended behavior. Hopefully he will get over it.
This is Zeus before his haircut. The camera has trouble focusing on fuzzy bunnies since there's not much to focus on. Not that you can tell much from the picture, but his coat is a lot less dense than Phineus'. He's also a much smaller bunny than Phineus. Zeus only produced two and a half ounces of clean white wool. The entire clip was about three and three quarter ounces, but there was a lot of not useful dirty wool. Zeus also got the usual procedure of nail clipping, Ivermectin and weighing. He is surprisingly only a four pound one ounce bunny. He's eleven months old, so he should be about full grown, but four pounds is pretty small. Since we have so few genetics available around here, he will be used for breeding, but if we had a choice, we'd probably not use him.
Which is another reason why the bunnies have been getting haircuts, there's new bunny breedings lined up. Zeus will be meeting Janet since she has a wonderful texture to her wool - even though she does carry the Vienna gene. Again, if we had more genetic options, she'd probably not be used, but what with her wonderful wool texture, she's meeting up with Zeus. We will probably only keep white offspring from this litter.
Phineus Phogge is meeting up with Suzie, a REW doe. Again, we will probably keep all the white ones from this litter. We really need more white fiber for Coconut Dream color of Hula Bunny yarn. There should be all kinds of possible colors in this litter, but this will be a first litter for Suzie.
The third planned litter is between the hybrid German/Satin buck, Zorro, and Sirocco, a chocolate agouti doe. She easily molts down to almost naked and as a German/Satin, he shouldn't necessarily be a molting type. We will see how it goes, this will be our first 'hybrid' angora litter. Depending on how they turn out, there may not be any more.
So these are the planned litters, they should show up late next month, I'll post more details on them on the 'In the Nestbox' page as time permits.