parakkum

We put the resident genius bunny, Stormy, on part of the stairway at my place yesterday. She sniffed around a little bit, then climbed up onto the next step (for reference, she's a Polish dwarf rabbit looking very much like the black bunny on the left of this page, and weighs in at around three and a half pounds, so a single step is taller than she is on all fours). Then she examined that step and climbed back down.

Then she took off up the stairway, climbing from step to step until she was picked up again near the top of the steps.

Risk assessment. She tried one step, made sure she could get back, determined that she could, then decided to go and see what was at the top of the stairs.

Smart bunny.

The date of earliest appearance of bunnies has been pushed back from about thirty-five million years ago to about fifty-five million years ago with the discovery of Gomphos elkema.

It had rabbit-like back legs, though its teeth and tail were more like those of a squirrel.

You can read the BBC story here.

That's still after the K/T boundary, though.

(But bunnies predate us by quite a while...)

Earlier I linked to this page about Polish breed bunnies, because Stormy looks almost exactly like the black bunny on the left of the page.

Well, they have a guide to judging Polish.

Yup, competition scoring, like dog shows.

Based on the guide on that page, Stormy is a near-perfect-scoring example of the Polish breed.

So now we may have more of a backstory for her. We know when we picked her up that Stormy had behavior issues and was just getting over a case of ear mites. She's a very smart bunny, which makes her a little cantankerous and energetic, too. So perhaps she was bred to be a show rabbit, but her behavior took her out of contention (as Honeyfields said, the judges probably didn't appreciate being bitten).

We have Return of the Jedi on right now. Vader just spoke his first few lines, and Beau (one of the four bunnies here) thumped, which is a danger signal.

He is a wise, wise bunny.

Stormy
Originally uploaded by parakkum.

Stormy, our resident genius bunny, has been part of many collaborative mutual training efforts. Most recently, we've reached an agreement that she'll go to the top of the bunny house (not pictured) for petting, so that kwc won't have to bend over all the time and damage his already-fatigued discs.

Of course, as part of trying to convince her to do this, we want to reward her when she does go to the top of the house, so we feel obliged to come over and pet her when she does so. Stormy was quick to capitalize on this to ensure more petting. Where before she would look and hope you'd notice, now she goes to the top of the house and stares at you until you come over.

As with many things involving human behavior, she gets it. Smart, smart rabbit.

Stormy chilling out after being returned
Originally uploaded by parakkum.

To avoid undue damage to trim, wiring and anything else within reach, the bunnies are either kept in a pen or allowed to run on the stairs while they're temporarily away from their normal bunny-safed apartment. On the stairs, they're stopped at the top by a door, and at the bottom by a cardboard barrier.

Stormy's been testing that barrier for a while now, sniffing around the edges and pushing at them. Today, she went for it and broke out. Once out, she didn't immediately sprint off, which let me retrieve her and put her back on the stairs. To reward her intelligence (since her freedom was so short-lived) I petted her for a while. The picture above is from this post-escape period.

Of course, pretty soon she was back at it, testing the barrier again:

Testing the barrier
Originally uploaded by parakkum.

(Note the chair reinforcing her point of prior escape.)

The bunnies -- Stormy, Beau, Lena and Pearl -- are back in San Jose, and have the full run of an apartment again.

They're still exploring (and need to be told occasionally not to eat the furniture).

Earlier this week I made a critical error in attempting to corral a bunny and picked up a nice injury.

The four bunnies were hanging out, when Stormy (bottom right black bunny) started to chase Pearl (upper black bunny)...

I went after Stormy intending to pick her up and let her know that we'd had enough bossing around of other bunnies for the night. She's the queen, but we don't want Pearl to feel harassed. Stormy ran for the cover of her bunny house, and I made the mistake of reaching in to get her. This intrusion into her safe place spooked her, so about ten seconds later she decided to make a break for it with all her sharp bits forward, exactly when I reached for her.

Bunny 1, clunky human 0 (though she didn't honestly mean to cut me).

That's from an accidental contact between bunny teeth and the top of my hand. I think the taste of blood grossed poor Stormy out, because she had to clean afterward:

(This is just a representative image of her cleaning, not from this week.)

But afterward she came by to check on me, and I made sure she was okay, and everything was good. We're still friends.

Stormy_Beau_Naptime
Originally uploaded by parakkum.

It's clear that should I have kids, I will be constantly restraining my desire to show pictures of them to everyone.

This is a shot of Stormy and Beau relaxing together when they were waiting for Littlestar's new apartment to be put in order. They now have a much larger living space and many new things to explore.

I just finished updating the bunnies' contact info at Home Again. Yes, the bunnies are RFID tagged.

In addition to needing to update the addresses, there were a few errors. They had Pearl listed as a male (she's a girl) and Stormy and Beau listed as dogs.

I refer you to this picture:

Not dogs. Though Stormy is the most doglike of the four.

Stormy defeated the closet door last month (possibly after months of contemplation).

littlestar's old apartment had sliding closet doors -- three of them for the bedroom closet -- the middle one set in front of the other two. I'm fairly confident that Stormy (pictured above) figured out how they work, because one day I heard this:

"THUD. THUD."

When I checked on it, Stormy was next to the middle sliding door, and was shoving at it with her two front paws, making concerted pushes. This was enough to make noise, but not much else -- a four-pound bunny just can't move a big, wood door that way.

Last month, however, I think she was able to take on the sliding doors in the new apartment. This time, I was alerted by the sound of an object falling over inside one of the closets. When I checked, it turned out that Stormy had managed to create enough of an opening to move through. What I think she did was push her nose into a small gap I'd left by not quite closing the closets all the way, then slowly wedged it open enough to slip through.

I'm definitely impressed.

Gratuitous bunny photos in the extended.

Like all of Littlestar's bunnies, Beau is a rescue. We know from his records that he was held somewhere overcrowded, and we know from his behavior that he was given access to junk food (he's the only bunny who consistently begs for carbs) and that he doesn't like being touched, although he is very affectionate. He'll also come by and check up on you if you lie down on the floor, so we've wondered if maybe some of the other bunnies caged with him died, and he's checking to make sure we're not dead.

Beau has progressed over time, largely due to Littlestar's patient care. When he first started living with Stormy, Beau would freeze when you went to pick him up, and stay frozen the whole time. These days, he tries to get away from you and grunts vigorously in annoyance when you finally pick him up. The last couple times he's been picked up for nail care or combing, however, he's actually been quite calm during the procedure itself.

Last Saturday it was time for another nail clipping, and Beau was exceptionally calm -- relaxed, even. The pictures above (and below in the extended) show Beau being by far the most chill of all the bunnies.

He's made really good progress.

More pics in the extended.

One of the benefits of the trip between here and my family being almost exactly five hundred miles (nearly to the mile!) is that I can chunk it into conceptual 50-mile, 10% increments.

In their book Mean Genes, Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan note that people rely heavily on trends and measurable progress. They use as an example of the latter case one author's profound mistake of having "Write Dissertation" on his daily to do list. The consequence of this misstep is having an incomplete task lurking on his list, day after day. Over time, this is a crushing thing. The alternate approach of breaking it down into achievable steps is much healthier. "Write draft of chapter one" might sit on the to do list for a short while, to be crossed out (done!) and replaced by "Revise draft of chapter one" and so forth.

Similarly, I've experimented over the years with different ways of chunking my trip along the length of California in psychologically useful ways. I've learned that I can't rely on physical landmarks -- I consistently misgauge where certain things are, and then my sense of progress is off, which can be discouraging. I initially tried looking at quarters -- that would be 125-mile increments -- but that's so long as to also be discouraging.

I finally settled on fifty-mile increments. Fifty miles goes fast enough that I'm not likely to find myself checking the trip odometer repeatedly, yet it's still a meaningful chunk of the trip -- 10%.

That, along with caffeine and sugar, maintains trip sanity.

I had Littlestar's bunnies as my traveling companions this time, as I took care of them with great help from my parents for the past two weeks. They were excellent travelers this time, taking a day-long car trip in stride, happily munching on hay and seagrass mats whenever we stopped for an extended break.

No kidding:

I don't think we're there yet:

NB: The high jumping of the steeplechase is not actually healthy for the bunnies involved. They can do those jumps (Stormy's even done jumps that high), but shouldn't do it a lot. Their bodies are really evolved for high-speed, ground-level sprints. Even when you're 4-8 pounds, jumping many times your own height puts stress on your bones.

littlestar has some mountain bunnies on her hands:

Following some requests on Flickr, I generated a photo tour of the bunny space that we set up at littlestar's place. It's received a lot of positive response, and other people are showing off their spaces in this discussion thread.

The fun starts here, at the entrance to the "pen" area:

...and continues, under Stormy's watchful gaze:

You can take the tour by clicking here to go to the photoset page or just clicking here to go to the first picture.

Flickr has a "popular" sorting mechanism for your pictures, sort of a compiled "how many views, how many favorites, how many comments?" deal that sorts your pictures into at least a notional most-to-least-popular order. Every so often, I like to see just how my pictures are assorting. Here's the current top six:

The trend is clear, I imagine.

Of course, popularity on Flickr is the intersection of "which pictures you publicize to groups or other areas" and "the kinds of things people like to look at." I put the bunnies pics up in groups a lot, and they're definitely a favorite viewing topic, so I suspect they will usually dominate the rankings in my picture pool.

I just like how this one came out.