Hamsters

The female hamster ran out again last night, the same one which escaped on Leap Day. According to my sister, it

...ran around and around in the wooden pen that papa built, in lesser than 1 minute!

I think she meant it ran super fast. The hamster, a she, has since bit 3 holes in the cardboard box in order to get out and each time, my father or brother would tape another piece of cardboard over the holes.
See the corners where there's extra cardboard and the Oreo covering? That's where she bit/scratched through them. The Oreo cardboard covers the latest hole.

It even managed to use its water bottle as a way to get out by climbing all the way up to the top and then jumping out from there. She made the latest hole above by climbing up the bottle and then biting a nice, round, even hole from there when we blocked her way out above with... some basket.


We couldn't shift her into a new tank (not that we have any) because she had just given birth not too long ago and we didn't want to disturb the nest she had amazingly built using tissue paper and torn up toilet rolls.

Nest of tissue paper. All hamsters asleep inside now.

Yes it looks a little tattered but we did not intentionally want her to live in this box with no view of the world except of the nice, white ceiling and our curious, oily, pimpled faces blowing bad air towards it. We had temporarily removed her from the tank which she had shared with the other male hamster before her birth because it had bit her butt until there were two bare areas. Maybe the male hamster liked a little action in their sexual activity. In any case we put her into the first best thing which could hold her, which happened to be this mandarin orange box. A couple of days later she started building a nest (I thought she was just bored) and one day my sister shouted that she saw a red lizard inside.

At a later stage when the babies are a little older, have a little more strength and were able to squirm out of the nest

All 5 babies have since grown up and are about as active as her, running all over the place. A couple of them anyway. The rest just sleep a lot. In that sense they are very alike their father. She was previously a lot more protective over her babies, but now that they have grown fur and have started running around a little, she has not been pulling tissue paper over them as frequently as in the past. Sometimes she even lets us see her feeding her babies.

I suppose they will be her babies for a while more before they grow older and become potential mates. *wrinkle nose* Incestuous! Heh.

Father just said he saw a baby hamster eat from the food container. That particular one's fast! Do they have teeth already?