Just went out for a ride in the beautiful sunshine we've got this morning... a very brief ride!
It just looked sooo inviting, and I thought (foolishly...) really, what's a little cold and a brisk breeze?? (It is Wintertime here in this part of South Oz, not the desert bits, so it's either cold and wet, or cold and windy, altho sometimes it's cold and wet and windy - but today, it's just cold and windy! ) so I thought I was tough enough to handle it and I'd give it a go!
Doh! 
The frost on the car in the driveway should've been sufficient warning, it was about an inch thick, and the plume of condensation from the Spyder exhaust as I let it idle & warm up while I geared up almost blanketed the whole street like a smoke screen - but the sun shining thru did make it look pretty enticing, so I thought... "What the hey, I'll give it a go." Silly me!
As I left, the outside thermometer on the house read 2°C, despite having been in direct sunlight for a couple of hours, but the Wind Chill effect from the 'breeze' we're currently getting, which is basically blowing straight off the Antarctic Ice Pack, is about -10°C, so the 'Feels Like' temp was about -8°C... until I started riding at 80-100 kph anyway, when riding into the wind added pretty close to another -10°C to that!! My heated mittens & socks just weren't up to the task, and the
extra layers of ultra-fine merino under high grade thermylactil, which was under all of my normal Winter riding gear/wind stop liners etc. didn't seem to even slow down the wind at all - it was so lazy it didn't go around, it just cut straight thru everything!!
I don't think I've felt quite that cold since I finished Survival Training for Polar Regions about 30 years ago, so my ride out (into the wind) via the back roads ended up being only as far as the nearest town in that direction, where I turned straight onto the main drag and headed down wind with all the lemmings on their way to work in order to get home by the shortest, most direct route! All up, it was probably only about 45-50 minutes of riding (once I got moving) but it's taken me a good hour after getting back to warm up enough to go thru the shivering stage, then peel all the layers off, and finally get warm enough for my finger (only one has defrosted that much so far!
) to start working well enough to type again - initially, I couldn't even get one finger to work well enough to turn on the voice-to-text!!
So now I'm inside sipping a fresh coffee, sitting in front of the heater outlet (it's going full bore!) with the bright sunshine streaming in on me thru the windows, watching the bloody rabbits cavorting in the mist gently rising off the pitiful remnants of my front lawn! They've simply swamped the electrified netting I had all around it & over part of it - apparently, if enough animals hit it all at once, the controller thinks it's blown up &/or started a fire, so after the first couple get zapped, the others just pile on until it over-loads and shuts down, but only after blowing the 240v supply circuit!
Did you know that zapped rabbit fur really stinks?!
I think I might stay inside now, at least until Winter is over!
(Oh, the temp outside in the direct sunshine has finally reached 5°C - it's now close to 10:00 am... but the Wind Chill is still around -10°C, so the 'Feels like' temp is still cold!
)
Once pregnant, the does generally take about 28-35 days to produce a litter of up to 14 or so kits; the kits then only take about 7-8 weeks to become fully independent and leave their mothers, who can then pretty much immediately start breeding up their next litter; with the females in the last lot becoming sexually mature/reaching breeding age at about 10-12 weeks, even tho they don't reach full size/maturity until they're about 18 months old! So just as long as there's enough feed and a fertile adult male rabbit around, they can breed like... well, rabbits - only that's a lot faster than most think, and in a good season (like the seasons we've had a few of lately, and look like having a few more of, as soon as this Winter is over), their numbers can increase exponentially! 
