Pinging Pouch-packing Pompoms

MY HAMSTERS CONSUMED AN ENTIRE WILD BIRD IN TWENTY MINUTES YESTERDAY.

Yes! Seeing as no food was to be found in the roborovski enclosure, save stray dry chiken bones and hunks of bread and the odd scone buried in the sawdust 'neath their wheel (they have an incorigable habit of stashing their din-dins, the swines!) I fed them a handful of "wild bird" seed; believing that, between the three of them, they might polish the last of it off that spot within perhaps three days. How wrong I was! Five minutes flat and the entire handful of seeds was GONE! My baby gremlins sat right on it stuffing their faces, filling their pouches more and more and more until literally they were three round fur-balls on the brink of explosion. Baby Itchy, being the tiniest, managed to return safely to the hamster-house to "disgorge". Then Bashful tried to follow suit and by this time I was watching closely. She was so enormously fat and rounded she could not fit through the entrance (that Yangyang had originally excavated as their house is just a small box of cardboard)... Looking embarrassed and distinctly inconvenienced, Bashful took to nibbling angrily at the doorway, sticking her head through and pushing... still too fat. The entire house shifted and threatened to fly up in the air to various rattlings of the seeds Itchy had already stashed inside... so she nibbled again and again and still wouldn't fit. Spherical, meantime, had totally given up on the hammyhouse seedery idea and disgorged hers in the Maltesers tube. So I snatched the hamster house up in my hands, much to Bashful's left and right and peering up into the sky in wonderment confusion and tore a bigger opening myself. On its return she viewed this human-smelling orifice with scepticism. Turned on her tail and was last seen emptying her seeds beneath the far righthand corner toilet tube...

It's hard to believe that these three critters, each the size of my thumb, can between them stash a handful of birdseed in one or two mouthfuls each and then literally the whole lot was so roundly polished off that nowt but woodshavings remained where the seeds had been. I put out another handful and they ran to hoard this lot as well. And I think by today they've eaten most of it, too. They eat a lot of food for their size. A lot of food compared to Yangyang, the Chinese hamster. And I'm not surprised either. They must burn it all up with all that racing around they do in their every waking minute...

Spherical (or "Merickal" - the new name I coined as Mother Hubbs says the original's too much of a (wild-bird-like(?)) mouthful) has made the hamster house her new bedroom, stuffed as it is with special hamster cotton wool (which I suspect is merely Johnson and Johnson's cotton wool pulled apart, died in a mild solution of food colouring and marked up about 1000%) whereas the other two remain in the limited Christmas edition Maltesers cardboard tube, woodshavings piled up each end. As I mentioned probably yesterday, Merickal's actually the most bashful, racing around in blind panicks each time I threaten to poke her with my fingertips; Bashful's quite tame and will actually wander up to me. She tries to eat my fingers unless I poke the back of her neck. In which case she endures this as a fellow robo-groom thing (they always wash each other's shoulders; I've no idea why). And Baby Itchy is just... the babiest gremlin. Surely a dwarf hamster dwarf, so tiny, you can feel her bones as you pick her up, poor cow. I don't think she's ill though as she runs the wheel with just as much enthusiasm as my other two. Only problem is, being so light if she decides on one direction when another wants the other, poor Baby Itchy ends up revolving round and round and round in constant loop-the-loops until she scrabbles off! (It's a wire wheel and so they can hang on while they spin upside down...)

Right on that note I'd better be off. The local shop are selling butterscotch flavour McVities chocolate digestives and I'm after something charming to dip into my tea.

Cheerio!

G

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