Our latest experiment

Timothy's favorite doe, Skittles - a broken black otter, delivered four babies recently but only one survived. However (and if you breed black otters, you'll understand the joy), the survivor is a black otter. And, even better, out of Bart, our young senior black buck who is very promising.

However, raising a single baby presents a problem. The last time we tried this, we ended up with a FAT baby that never could get its legs under it. That big belly on overweight babies presses the legs out of shape and they don't come back.

So we're trying an experiment. After leaving the nest box with Skittles 24/7 for 3 days, we are now removing the nest box and returning the box with baby to Skittles once a day. We'll be monitoring the baby's condition (Specifically, how's that belly looking? We don't want a wrinkled starving belly but we don't want a sumo-wrestler look, either.) and hope that by the time the baby is ready to come out of the nest box, it is healthy and sort of slim.

We've put the nest box inside an empty 24x24 cage and placed a reflector lamp with 75-watt bulb on top the cage. Because I wasn't sure how warm the baby needed to be in the current summer heat (we can hold our barn at between 70-80 degrees), I placed the lamp at the front edge of the cage top so the baby (I hoped) could wiggle under the lamp or away from it, depending on his warmth needs.

I learned something interesting in this experiment. It is the baby that forms the lovely fur cloud in the nest box. When I put the baby in its own cage, its bed of fur was pressed down from Skittle's last feeding trip.

But today, when I went to return the baby to Skittles' pen, there was a lovely airy puff of fur. The baby had moved from the back of the nest box to the front.

I'll keep you posted on our experiment.