It's slowly becoming colder and colder outside, so it's no longer possible to have the rabbits in their outside enclosure for most of the time. If we wanted to, we could have put them in a permanent outside cage but we prefer to keep them indoors during the winter, so it's getting really chilly for them now that we see temperatures like 5 degrees Celsius.
They still need to get fresh food every day, so now's the time to bring the forest into their indoor cage!
Phil (the white rabbit) sure is enjoying the birch (Betula pubescens). As you can see below, Kompis on the other hand tries out the aspen (Populus tremula) first. Despite him checking out the aspen, it soon became clear that they didn't care for it, since it was still mostly there after a few hours, while all the birch was gone by that point.
It's a pity that they didn't care for aspen, because I'm currently working on an experiment where we chop down a lot of aspen trees. We always get some leftover trees that can not be used for the experiment, so it would have been an easy way to get them a lot of fresh food every day.
The experiment is actually pretty cool, and I'm working on trying to figure out if beavers (Castor fiber) prefers to eat aspen trees that are unmodified, or if they will select randomly from the three categories; 1) unmodified, 2) partially modified, or 3) very modified.
I have a lot to say about this experiment, but that is a topic for another day. I'm currently working on creating a small series of post about this experiment, but you won't be able to read them for at least 3-4 weeks, because I want to get the first results in before I begin to post the series.
Anyway, I hope everyone is having a great Sunday! Tomorrow I will try birch and another non-toxic tree, then repeat it with their preferred tree plus another random species, and eventually we'll see which tree species is their favorite. I have a feeling that Norway maple (Acer platanoides) might make it very high on the list, but we'll see. And thanks for stopping by my blog!
