Monday, July 17, 2006

Our New Babies

As promised, more about our new babies – a pair of male Dwarf Russian Hamsters.
They are so sweet! I could watch them for hours! So, we got them home and let them out of their little transit-box. They emerged together at first, but the water-bottle-clip was too loose and the white one got scared and hid in the box! The little black one scampered around the cage though, and it was decided that we would call him Aston, and that his brother would be called Martin. They seem to be too little for the wheel in their cage, so we took it out (they were getting quite cross, we thought) and instead put a little plastic house in there, a wooden strawberry and a kitchen-roll tube.
Martin has started to come out of his shell a little bit, and was being inquisitive about the tube when I went to bed. Aston is a bit of a climber, and had been climbing on and over all sorts of things in the cage! This, however, led to a bit of a mishap! When I came downstairs this morning I noticed that the water bottle was out of place – it would seem that Aston had climbed up on to the water bottle and it had fallen down into the cage. Lots of the cage litter was very damp, poor boys. So, I sneaked the top of the cage off and cleared out the wettest bits while trying not to disturb the poor lads. No doubt that some of it was still a little damp, but I think I got the worst of it. As it isn’t recommended that you disturb them too much in the first 48 hours, we were not going to clean them out this soon, but with the water-bottle issue we may have to! Bless. They have done various bits of burrowing, digging, hoarding and even a little bit of nesting in their new house. Hopefully they will tame easily and we’ll be able to clean them out often enough to make sure that they don't smell.
I'm very happy with our boys, they are so cute! Hopefully they will be the happiest pair of dwarf Russian Hamsters in the whole world!
Anyway, Leon and I are working on getting some photos of the baby boys as soon as they’re a little more tame (don’t want to scare them) so pictures to come!

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