Note to Self About That Backyard Bunny Incident We Barely Survived

Dear Priya from last April.

You're currently standing frozen in the damp Chicago grass, holding a weed whacker in one hand and a half-eaten string cheese in the other. Your toddler is strapped to your back in the ergonomic carrier, fussing because he dropped his pacifier somewhere near the patio. You just parted the tall weeds near the fence line and found a shallow depression in the dirt filled with wriggling, grey fur. Take a breath, yaar. You're about to make several unforced errors.

Listen, treating the backyard like a pediatric ICU is your first mistake. You spent five years doing pediatric triage at Rush, so your brain immediately snaps to clinical protocol. Assess the airway. Check for maternal abandonment. Initiate a rescue plan. But nature doesn't care about your nursing degree, and stepping in usually just makes everything exponentially worse.

Stop calling them bunnies

It sounds cute, but calling them bunnies just feeds into the seasonal marketing delusion that these are plush toys meant for children's baskets. When you finally call Dr. Sharma at the veterinary clinic in a blind panic, you'll ask what's a baby rabbit called, expecting some complex Latin classification.

He'll sigh, probably taking a sip of lukewarm coffee, and tell you it's a kit. Or a kitten. I guess it depends on who you ask, but the vet sounded fairly certain about the terminology. A female is a doe, and a male is a buck. Knowing what are baby rabbits called doesn't change the immediate reality that they're sitting out in the open, completely vulnerable, while the neighbor's golden retriever paces the fence line.

The triage protocol for a hole in the ground

You assume the mother is gone forever. She isn't. I've seen a thousand anxious first-time moms in the ER who hover over their infants like security cameras, so you expect the rabbit mother to do the exact same thing. But she only visits the nest twice a day, usually at dawn and dusk, specifically to avoid drawing predators' attention to her babies. An unattended nest is rarely an abandoned nest.

You're going to want to scoop them up and bring them inside the house. Don't do it.

Put down the shoe box and go get some yarn from the craft drawer instead. Lay the yarn over the nest in a tic-tac-toe pattern, then walk away and check back in twelve hours. If the mother comes back, the yarn gets disturbed. It's a messy, imperfect diagnostic tool, but my old attending physician told me once that half of medicine is just waiting to see what happens. This is the waiting part.

If you absolutely have to mow the lawn that day, put a plastic laundry basket over the nest and weigh it down with a heavy rock to block the mower blades and keep stray dogs out, but make sure you remove it completely before dusk so the mother can actually return to feed them.

There's a rule of thumb I half-remembered reading from the Tufts wildlife clinic regarding older kits. If the baby rabbit is about the size of a softball, hopping around on its own, and fully furred with erect ears, it's fine. It's roughly three weeks old and entirely independent. Leave it be, even if it looks entirely too small to be facing the world alone.

Managing human teeth while worrying about animal ones

While you're having a minor existential crisis over yard maintenance and wildlife preservation, your toddler is currently trying to gnaw on the wooden patio furniture. Teething is ruthless and respects no one's schedule. We were leaning on the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy heavily around this specific week.

It's honestly the only thing that worked for us during that phase. The flat shape is easy for his small, uncoordinated hands to grip without dropping it into the dirt every four seconds. It has these textured edges that apparently hit his swollen gums just right, and because it's food-grade silicone, I could just toss it straight into the dishwasher when he inevitably threw it near the rabbit hole. It's highly practical and saved my sanity that afternoon when I couldn't hold him and handle the yard tools at the same time.

The milk replacer disaster

You'll start doom-scrolling on your phone, wondering what do baby rabbits eat, and your first maternal instinct will be to run to the fridge for cow's milk. Stop right there. Cow's milk causes massive digestive distress in these animals and is essentially a death sentence.

If a domestic kit is actually orphaned and you're forced to intervene, you've to use goat milk or Kitten Milk Replacer. And you've to feed them sitting upright. Never on their backs. If fluid gets into their lungs, they develop aspiration pneumonia instantly. It's exactly like feeding a premature human infant, except smaller and with a much higher mortality rate.

And honestly, even if you do everything flawlessly, they might just die from the sheer stress of you handling them. The clinical reality is capture myopathy, which basically means their tiny hearts give out from sheer terror when a giant human picks them up.

Once domestic baby rabbits hit three weeks, they wean onto alfalfa hay and pellets. The alfalfa has calcium they need for their growing bones. Then around seven months, they switch to timothy hay because continuing the alfalfa gives adult rabbits painful bladder stones. It's an incredibly delicate physiological system for an animal that breeds in shallow dirt holes.

I was dressed in whatever I could find that morning, but my son was wearing his Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie. It's a solid piece of clothing. The organic cotton breathes well in the humid Chicago spring, and it stretches just enough that I can wrestle him into it without a sustained physical fight. The undyed fabric is supposed to be better for his mild eczema, and even though it got completely covered in mud and dandelion stains while I was kneeling in the grass, it washed out perfectly fine. It's a reliable base layer when you're dealing with outdoor chaos.

The plush toy illusion and tiny bones

After the backyard incident resolves, you'll have a brief, sleep-deprived thought about adopting a domestic rabbit as a pet. The House Rabbit Society would like a word with you.

They clearly state rabbits aren't recommended for kids under seven. Toddlers are loud, erratic, and entirely lack impulse control. Rabbits are ground-dwelling prey animals. When a toddler picks up a rabbit, the rabbit's brain registers that a hawk has just swooped down and grabbed it from above.

The rabbit kicks in terror. The child drops the struggling rabbit. The rabbit's fragile spine breaks on the floor. I've heard enough grim stories from vet tech friends to know this is a common reality in households with small kids. A rabbit lives for a decade, meaning you're the one taking care of it, not the toddler. Small children miss the subtle signs of GI stasis until the animal's bowel is obstructed and it's already dying.

To distract him from the wildlife, I bought the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. They're soft rubber blocks with numbers and fruit printed on them. They're okay.

They do the job of keeping a toddler occupied for about ten minutes at a stretch. The muted colors are aesthetically pleasing, I suppose, and they don't look terrible scattered across the living room rug. But they're just blocks. He mostly likes to chew on them and occasionally throws one at the cat. At least they don't leave dents when they hit the drywall.

Floor rules for the easily overwhelmed

If you ever ignore all advice and actually get a domestic rabbit, there are strict rules to enforce. Sit on the floor and pet the head and back gently while avoiding the ears and avoiding pulling the fur. Give them space when they hop away to hide under the sofa. Only adults do the lifting. Keep kids entirely away from the litter box.

Rabbits eat their own night droppings. They're called cecotropes. They need them to maintain their gut bacteria. It's objectively disgusting to watch, but medically necessary for their survival. Keep the toddler's hands far away from that biological situation.

The enclosure reality check is harsh, too. Those tiny pet store cages are useless garbage. Rabbits need at least twelve square feet of flat space to move around, like a dog exercise pen. Wire bottoms cause sore hocks, which are essentially pressure ulcers on their feet. I treated enough diabetic foot ulcers in the hospital to know I don't want to manage bedsores on a pet.

Skip the pine and cedar shavings because the phenols in the wood mess up their liver and respiratory systems. Use plain paper bedding. Give them safe applewood sticks to chew on because their teeth never stop growing and they'll destroy your baseboards otherwise. It's endless, daily maintenance.

Browse our organic baby clothes collection while you contemplate the absolute chaos of nature.

You survived the yard incident. The mother came back under the cover of darkness. The nest emptied out a week later and the grass grew back over the hole. Next time you see fur in the weeds, just leave the yard alone, turn around, and go back inside the house where it's safe.

If you're dealing with your own backyard wildlife crisis while trying to manage a teething toddler, explore our sustainable baby essentials to make the human part of your day slightly easier.

The questions I asked Dr. Sharma at 2 AM

What are baby rabbits called when they're first born?

They're called kits or kittens. I still think it sounds weird to call a rabbit a kitten, but that's the official terminology. A female is a doe and a male is a buck. My mother-in-law still just calls them all pests when they eat her tomato plants, which is also fairly accurate.

What do baby rabbits eat if they live in the wild?

Wild kits nurse from their mother for about three to four weeks. Her milk is incredibly rich, which is why she only needs to feed them twice a day. After that, they start foraging for grasses, clover, and whatever native plants are growing in your yard. Don't try to feed them carrots. Bugs Bunny lied to all of us.

Can my toddler catch something from a wild rabbit in the yard?

Technically yes, wild animals carry parasites and bacteria, but the risk is pretty low if your kid isn't really touching them or playing in their feces. Just wash their hands if they've been digging in the dirt near a nest. I worry more about my kid eating a stray mushroom than I do about him catching something from a rabbit.

How do I know if the nest is really abandoned?

You probably don't. The mother is a master at ignoring her kids so predators don't find them. Do the string test. Lay some yarn over the nest in a pattern and check back the next morning. If the yarn is moved, she was there. If the babies are warm and have round little bellies, she's definitely feeding them.

Should I move a nest if it's in a bad spot in the yard?

Absolutely not. If you move the nest, the mother won't be able to find it when she comes back. She doesn't track them by scent like a bloodhound, she relies on the exact geographical location she left them in. Just put a laundry basket over it during the day if you're worried about your dog, and uncover it at night.