A week in the life of my pets and guests - April

Daisy

Daisy

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Welcome to a week in the life of me, my pets (two gerbils and a Chinese hamster) and my animal guests (aka boarders)!

Monday
11am

It’s the Easter holidays so I’m fairly busy with animals, although not as busy as I was last year as I think with the cost of living, less people are going away. I currently have six Syrians (five females, one male), a female Russian dwarf and a male mouse staying, but three of the Syrians are going home today. It’s very unusual to have so many female Syrians staying. I usually get more males than females.

I have two jobs. My main job is an online freelance role and then I also have a small animal boarding business (mostly hamsters and gerbil, occasionally mice, degus, rats). The two jobs work well together because I can be around to keep an eye on the animals, and since I set my own hours I can always go to the vet etc whenever needed.

So far today I have got two of the three hamsters ready to go home. I have tidied and spot cleaned their cages and got all of their belongings together.

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Then I answered an email enquiry from someone wanting boarding for a Syrian in May.

I still need to work my main job for around 6 hours today. Monday is typically a fairly productive day so I'm hoping that will hold true today!
 
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Look at that face! She is adorable peering out of the pet carrier and looks perfectly contented, if curious. It sounds really interesting doing pet boarding and they are in safe hands with you! It must be reassuring to owners that you are experienced with hamsters. I hope the rest of the day goes well!

I think this is going to be a very interesting thread with all sorts of different animals :)
 
Great start to the week Daisy, I had no idea you boarded all those animals, it will be lovely to see some of them, and the lovely Leo of course!
Lovely photo of the Syrian girl in her character, what a sweet looking girl.
 
Really looking forward to this week with your thread Daisy. Thank you for doing it on top of everything else that occupies your time.
Small animal boarding is a lovely thing to do and owners must feel confident with such an experienced carer.
Then there are your own 3 as well.
Love the photo of your boarder!
 
7.30pm
The three hamsters have all been collected. One of the most annoying things is when an evening collection is late, and I'm tired and wanting to end my day but have to wait for someone to turn up! Fortunately today everyone was on time.

People do like being able to leave their hamsters and gerbils with someone with experience, as most small animal boarders are focused on rabbits and guinea pigs. Some of my customers call me the "hamster hotel" which is cute!

I've just fed the animals, spot-cleaned wherever needed, and given those animals who were already awake a bit of attention. Sometimes I let hamsters or gerbils go in a playpen or free roam on the landing but this Easter most of the animals seem to be the more aloof type, happier to stay in their cages. I'm almost convinced that hamsters are less active when it's colder and it has been a very cold spring so far. They seem more lively in the summer.

This is Poppy. She's a new guest this Easter and she seems like an intelligent hamster. I was quite impressed by the way she worked out how to manoeuvre a large biscuit treat through her tunnels. Once it couldn't be pushed any further, she exited the tunnel, and came round the other way to pull the biscuit instead.

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As hoped, it was a productive day! I got all my work done and tidied the animal room a bit. So that's it until tomorrow...
 
Clever Poppy! She looks very sweet in that photo and it was quite a visual image of her getting a biscuit through a tube!
 
Sounds like your day went well. Poppy is clever, I love watching how they figure things out!
I find the hams quieter when it’s colder too, hopefully it will warm up a bit more soon.
Lovely photo too.
 
Just catching up on your thread Daisy and I can't wait for the next update. 💕
 
Tuesday
7pm

Today I needed to mix some new food for my own pets, but first I had to go to my local pet shop to hopefully find some dried marigold for Leo's mix.

I went to the pet shop a few weeks ago and they had four baby guinea pigs with their mother in a cage. They were sweet so it was very upsetting to see a sign on the pet shop door today reporting that two of the baby guinea pigs had been stolen. There were CCTV photos of the thieves, and they were known shop-lifters apparently. They just took them from the cage and stuffed them into a bag, leaving the mother and siblings behind. I can't imagine why anyone would steal baby guinea pigs except I suppose to try to sell them. I just hope if they were sold, that they found a good home in the end.

They didn't have any dried marigold at the pet shop. In fact they didn't have any dried forage at all though they used to have a good range. So I will have to order it online and add it to Leo's mix later. I did get some dried chamomile flowers from Holland and Barrett. I mixed enough food to last the gerbils and Leo a couple of months.

Work was a bit hard-going and tedious today but I managed to finish anyway.

I also weighed my gerbils (68g and 88g, which I'm happy with) and let them out for a short run. Twiglet in the past hasn't done well with free roaming in a whole room so I sectioned off just a small area of the landing to see if she coped better with that, and she was still a bit nervous but not as much. Here they are running around. It is their first birthday on Saturday so I plan to spoil them!

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Poppy the Syrian has just been collected and I've fed and spot cleaned the animals, and sent updates to a couple of owners.

Cali the Russian dwarf is another new guest this Easter and she's irresistibly cute. Today she hopped onto my hand and allowed me to hold her for a few minutes which was lovely. She's also obsessed with sunflower seeds and arrived with a very large tub of them!

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Astra and Twiglet are so beautiful! They look like they had so much fun. I laughed at their interest in the radiator.

What a lovely compliment to have Cali hop on to your hand.
 
Goodness their tails are longer than I imagined :) The grey one matches the carpet. I also laughed that one copied the other in checking out the radiator! That is a really big bendy bridge! And the wood toy at the end with holes in looks fascinating.

Your little boarding dwarfie is very cute :) It's annoying when you can't find the right ingredients. I've only ever bought marigold petals online - Baldwins herbalists sell just about everything, but delivery isn't that quick. I actually grow the old English marigolds (calendula) in the garden in my small veg patch (it's supposed to deter pests from the vegetable patch). But drying and harvesting petals could be quite time consuming!
 
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Maz said:
Goodness their tails are longer than I imagined :) The grey one matches the carpet. I also laughed that one copied the other in checking out the radiator! That is a really big bendy bridge! And the wood toy at the end with holes in looks fascinating.

Your little boarding dwarfie is very cute :) It's annoying when you can't find the right ingredients. I've only ever bought marigold petals online - Baldwins herbalists sell just about everything, but delivery isn't that quick. I actually grow the old English marigolds in the garden in my small veg patch (it's supposed to deter pests from the vegetable patch). But drying and harvesting petals could be quite time consuming!
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The toy at the end was called a "Mouse Racetrack" and I bought it from Zoo-Bio a few years but unfortunately they seem not to exist anymore and I've never seen it anywhere else. It is usually a favourite with free roaming animals.

It is a huge bendy bridge! I mainly bought for the occasional times I have rats staying, as it's much more rat-sized than hamster or gerbil-sized really. I remember I bought it from a slightly strange pet shop which had cats wandering around freely, including one who sat on the counter and looked at my purchases with the kind of withering look only a cat can give (probably because I wasn't buying cat treats).
 
I accidentally bought a really big one like that once online - they had two sizes and I thought the smaller size was maybe a bit small for a large Syrian so went for the larger one - which didn't sound THAT big - but it was huge when it arrived (intended for guinea pigs I think). I would have used it anyway but it filled up the cage too much! Yours looks like a nice climbing toy for the gerbils.
 
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Lovely video and photo. Very sad news about the baby guinea pigs.
 
I forgot about that bit in your post. That is really awful. It makes you wonder why anyone would still guinea pigs and why only two of them.
 
That's a lovely video of the cute gerbils running around. It must be great to get to meet so many rodents with all their different personalities.

If those two people who took the guinea pigs are known shop lifters, it shouldn't be too difficult for the police to find them.
 
Beryl said:
That's a lovely video of the cute gerbils running around. It must be great to get to meet so many rodents with all their different personalities.

If those two people who took the guinea pigs are known shop lifters, it shouldn't be too difficult for the police to find them.
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Thank you. It is great to meet so many different personalities and also especially nice to see an animal who stays regularly as they grow and change. The Syrians in particular seem to change the most as they grow from nervy and jumpy youngsters to confident adults.
 
Lovely update about the goings on.
But heart breaking about the baby guinea pigs, I hope they were old enough for the separation and don’t end up alone in the wrong hands. Just cruel.
 
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