Luckily, Snuggles knew what to do–she piled the bedding around the babies to keep them warm and safe. She also took a tissue up there and shredded it into pieces which she tucked around her babies.
The babies stayed safe for the first few days, until one evening, a baby went off a wiggling and fell down the red tube to the main compartment. I suggested to Mark that this probably wasn’t real good for a baby hamster, and we set about pondering all sorts of options. We settled on taking the top part of the cage with the baby hamsters in it, removing the lid, and putting it inside an aquarium lined with bedding. Then we put Snuggles inside.
This set-up worked to contain the babies for a couple more days.
In fact, Snuggles did a nice job trying to keep her babies contained. And I told her so.
But within a few days, the babies started getting out of their container. The good news was that when they fell out, it was an inch or so down and onto thick bedding.
Thebad news was that Snuggles didn’t seem able to pick up her babies and put them back into the container, instead, she kicked bedding on top of them to cover them up and walked away. Well, Mark and I had invested way too much time worrying about these babies, and the potential that they could get sad or lost or lonely or hungry didn’t sit well with us. So we did hamster round-ups, grabbing vagabond babies and putting them back into their container. We put the babies back into the plastic container several times a day for two days before we moved the babies into a box with sides higher than the plastic container.
It was while the hamsters were in the box that I noticed that nursing eight babies sometimes required Snuggles to lie upside for a while. That’s her tail and feet in the far corner of this photo; her head is down in the bedding somewhere. Now that’s a mom for ya.
Well, the box only worked for a couple more days before we had to do hamster round-ups again. After two more days rounding up hamsters, we finally took the babies out of the box and put them on the bottom of the aquarium. There, they gathered into a ball part of the day, nursed part of the day, and wobbled around part of the day.
Fuzzy hamster babies are so adorable, we couldn’t help ourselves any longer and had to start playing with them. This is one of two tan and white pandas.
This is one of the black and white pandas. There are 5 black and white babies.
This is the only hamster baby that is all black except for its pink-white feet.
Yesterday, when we took the hamsters out to play for a bit, we saw that they had their eyes open. We also read online that they like tomato slices, and seeds, and well, this happened.
In fact, all the babies started munching on real food yesterday. That means we really do have 8 more mouths to feed. Which means we need to buy even more hamster food.
The last remaining problem was that Snuggles was literally trying to climb the side of the aquarium, either to escape from her 8 babies or because she needed to exercise. Luckily, Mark had ordered a few more of these.
And even luckier, one of the cages went on top of an aquarium. So we attached it, found an exercise wheel from another cage in the garage and in no time, Snuggles was back to her exercise program.
So, in the lats two weeks, we’ve addressed baby hamsters falling down tubes, babies getting out of plastic containers, babies getting out of boxes, and, most recently, lack of exercise for Snuggles, the mom. We hope we’re done with hamster issues for a while. Which, now that I look at the cage, will only be until the babies learn how to climb.
Damnit those little rodents are cute!