Hi everyone
thanks for your messages. Firstly my partner couldn't possibly have left them where they were as they were in our allotment where we have vegetables growing! Most people at our allotments would have killed them I know that for a fact, these ones were almost minced alive as my partner was rotavating the ground so they were very lucky!
We tried putting them outside our allotment in a warm box which we hoped their mum would take them from, as if we had left them in our allotment i doubt she would attempt to remove them over the fence probably put them back in the burrow. 5 rabbits and an allotment don't go very well!
unfortuanately mum came back into the plot looking for them but failed to find them outside. Temparatures dropped the night after and obviously they hadn't received any food for a while so i decided the best thing to do was to take them to my local vets for advice.
i have decided with the full support of a lovely veterinary nurse to handrear them myself. i had some training on this yesterday! i have so far sucessfully gave them a feed last night and this morning, and hopefully my partner is now giving them their lunchtime feed!
in the meantime we have made the fences even higher in our allotment and are taking other measures to stop this from happening again. i love rabbits and have previously kept them for years so do have some experience but obviously not of wild ones so i'm going to do the best for them that i possibly can!
the only thing worrying me is the releasing of them if they do survive. i've seen stoats take bunnies at our allotment before a few times, plus most of them have mxy. my vet told me they have a man who rescued a wild bunny and has brought it up as a pet, apparently not the friendliest bunny but doing fine. I had a rabbit who was a belgian hare and i used to have to put gardening gloves on to pick her up!