Summer Haircuts
Summer haircuts are always a good thing, although this summer hasn't been very sunny at all yet. It's been the wettest and grayest spring the bunnies have seen in a long time. This is Hawaii, after all, there should be sunshine! Well, here at Hillside Farm, at least our 'crops' don't depend on the weather. Exquisite bunny fluff appears even in the rain. Of course, it's not improved by dampness, but at least it still appears.
For all the folks wondering how the bunnies are doing with the earthquakes and volcanic activity that has been happening on this island for the past month, the bunnies are doing well. All the lava has been on the other side of Hilo and about ninety miles away from the bunnies. The bunnies are safe and well.
What with the lava flow over in Puna, though, a lot of folks on this island are now concerned with volcanic smog, which we call 'vog', as well as the lava flow itself, of course. The vog has been heavy enough to damage crops but we're on the side of the island upwind from the caldera and fissures, so the bunnies are doing well. The tradewinds have been blowing all the volcanic emmissions the other way. The bunnies' major concern is that one of their favorite bunny wranglers had to evacuate yesterday because of the lava. His bunny, Darkstar, will be over here for awhile until thing settle down over in that area or until he gets relocated. Fortunately, he has another property not in the path of the lava flow, but it doesn't have as nice of a house on it nor much of a bunny hutch yet. The lava flow could keep going for quite some time.
The whole month of May was basically a lava flow getting bigger and bigger every day. There's over a hundred houses lost, over a thousand folks evacuated and the lava is threatening to flow over the last road that can access a large portion of Lower Puna. There was even someone who got hit by flying lava! Usually the lava is docile enough that folks don't get injured by it. It eats houses, roads, beaches, gardens, etc., but usually people are okay. As okay as they can be, anyway, after lava eats their house and community.
Another effect of the lava has been a whole lot less tourists visiting the islands. The news crews, especially the mainland ones, are making a big dramatic spectacle of the lava flows and to many folks on the mainland as well as the rest of the world, the perception is that the whole state is being covered in lava. The actual lava is in one small corner of Hawaii Island, aka the "Big Island". There's vog and laze (volcanic haze) which can require respirators for the laze and a mask or even just a bandanna for the vog. That goes whichever way the wind blows, but since the wind generally blows one way, it's pretty predictable where it's gonna be. But, over 50% of the prospective visitors have cancelled their vacations, even to the island of Kauai which is hundreds of miles away and not affected by the lava flow. Tourism is Hawaii's major economic support, so now there's folks who have lost their home to lava and their jobs to the visitors who are staying away. So, May was a lot of chaos and it's not over yet.
Well, this is a bunny website, we should put in a bit about the bunnies! There's four baby bunnies and they're now bigger and fluffier.
The two youngest ones, the Snotty Nosed Crew, are still snotty nosed. They were born in a rainstorm, were sneezing and had dirty noses as babies. They were better for awhile, but even though they aren't sneezing anymore they still have snotty noses. The smaller fawn usually has a snottier nose than the lilac. In the picture they are seven weeks old so they are still young bunnies. Their parents are Tootsie & Sydney. I think the babies are both boys, it's a little early to be certain, but I'm guessing they're a pair of boys. They are the friendliest little guys, they'd rather nose bump and get scritches behind their ears than run to the food dish when they're being fed.
The baby fawn is much smaller than the baby lilac. He doesn't seem to have any physical deformaties, he's just much smaller than his brother. I should weigh them and get some valid numbers on the size differences. I do like the dark russet fawn color and his wool is nice and soft, but as a buck and a runt, will he be good enough to sire offspring? Will he provide enough fiber to make housing him separately worth while? The females can all live in one big hutch which makes caring for a lot of bunnies much easier than if they all had separate hutches. I think they're happier with friends, too. The boy bunnies live in their own separate spaces since they can fight when they're housed together as adults. But, he's still a young'un, so he can live with his brother and we will see how things go.
All four of the babies have Sydney as their sire. The first two that have been pictured, the fawn and lilac, have Tootsie as their mum. The other two, the tortoiseshell and black, have Ziggy Stardust as their mum.
This baby is a female, I think. She has a delicate 'girl bunny' type of face. She's eight weeks old and is probably old enough that I could tell pretty much for certain, but I've not checked lately. She's a tortoiseshell and has nice soft wool, although it doesn't have as much silky feel to it as her brother's coat. So far her coat isn't showing any tangles, so she may have a nice 'easy keeper' type of coat. We will see what it looks like in another couple of weeks.
This little guy is the brother of the tortoiseshell so he's also eight weeks old. He's got a really exquisite texture to his wool, it's soft and silky and just lovely. I may keep him even though he has the Vienna gene (as you can tell by the white dot on his head) just because of the quality of his wool. He can't be shown at a bunny show because of the white dot on his head, but the texture of his wool is just so exquisite so he may hang around here and he may even be used for breeding. If he had white offspring, then if they had white dots on their head nobody would notice. We will see how he does as he gets older. So far his wool is wonderful and he doesn't show any tangles.
The weather still hasn't quite warmed up like we'd have expected it to for summer time, but we're starting summer haircuts anyway. The first part of getting ready to shear the herd is to sharpen all the scissors and grooming tools. Here's the pile of sharpened tools. Most of them are carbon steel so they blacken instead of staying shiny bright, but they do take a nice sharp edge.
It's easier to see them after they're organized, but it's the same pile of tools.
For the first quite a few years, about the only grooming tools we used were the little embroidery snips. They work well although they're slower than the hairdressers scissors. However, when first learning to groom bunnies and harvest their wool, the little embroidery snips are safer since they don't open as wide and there's a lot less chance of "Oops! Sorry, bunny!" The hairdresser scissors are much faster to use since they can snip more wool at each pass, but there's a lot more chance that they will snip more than just wool. On some of the hairdresser's scissors, I've sharpened the tips so they will fit into the really dense coats better. They work well, but I'd not recommend them as good tools when first starting to learn how to clip an angora bunny's coat until there's been some practice with the smaller embroidery snips.
Once the tools were sharpened, we tested them out with a few haircuts. Sydney needed a full haircut since his coat was ready to harvest. Here's what he looked like when we started. He has some mats and tangles on his ear fringes and there's the beginnings of mats on the side of his face.
Kinda hard to tell there's a bunny under all that wool. If you can't tell, his nose is pointing to the right. We may want him to meet up with some girl bunnies pretty soon and when he has this much wool on him, he's not very effective at being a stud bunny.
We collected a whole gallon jar full of wool from Sydney with this haircut. He's usually pretty glad to get all that wool off, especially during the warmer part of the year. He's also learned that frequently after a hair cut, there may be a girl bunny visiting him. With that kinda incentive, he kinda likes haircuts. I'm not sure if the girl bunnies like haircuts as much since they get a haircut before vising the boys.
The bunnies don't always get shorn down to nothing. Depending on what stage their coat is in, sometimes it's not ready for a full harvest.
In this case, Janet's coat wasn't quite ready to be completely harvested. She's a little shaggy, but the growing in coat is only about 3/4ths there. So, the longer bits were groomed off and the undercoat was left to grow longer. This is done by plucking instead of shearing.
Even though her coat wasn't harvested, we still got a lot of fluff off of her. The rest of her coat can grow out and it will probably be ready in another few weeks.