Boys and girls

Took the babies to the vet to be sexed last night. Four boys and two girls! We’ve left the girls in with their mother (Nippy) and put the boys in yet another cage. They look a bit lost and forlorn, poor things.

The photos are spreading...

Yay! Another photo of mine's hit the big-time:

01962.com the definitive online guide to winchester

Another photo from the same gig is still online here:

winchestermassive.co.uk

Photo equipment

All the photos of the babies were taken using a Canon 350D. I’ve used a range of lenses, including a 50mm f/1.8, a 70-200 f/4, a 300mm f/4 IS, a borrowed 50mm Macro and an old Carl Zeiss 50mm lens on extension tubes. I’ve also bought some automatic extension tubes that let me get in closer, but Nippy and the babies spook easily, so I’ve mainly been shooting at 1.5m with the 300mm IS. They don’t like strong light, so I’ve had to make do with the dim lighting available, shooting at ISO 1600 and about 1/20 sec shutter speeds, which has been challenging.

Hamster Story

We bought Nippy and Scampi from our local pet store in Cambridge in January 2006. The girl in the pet shop picked up one of them (probably Nippy) and said "it’s a boy". I asked her if the other one in the cage was also a boy and she replied "oh, we wouldn’t put different sexes together".

Nippy soon became Nippy because she did everything at high speed, and would run towards any hand placed near her so she could bite it. After the somewhat controversial approach of letting her bite it, she decided that she wouldn’t bother, since it seemed to have no effect. Scampi became Scampi because he scampered away from, well, pretty much everything. Apart from the way they behaved we couldn’t tell them apart.

After about ten days Nippy started stealing Scampi’s food. If we gave both of them a nut at the same time Nippy would pouch his nut, run over to Scampi and scoop his one out with his paw. Scampi would roll on his back and pretty much take it, with maybe a little squeak or two. Almost overnight Nippy became quite fat.

The next day I was at work when my girlfriend phoned me in a panic: “There’s a baby in the cage and they’re trying to kill each other”. I rushed home on the earliest train, to find one hamster in our spare travel cage and the other out of sight. At the time we assumed that Scampi was the mother and Nippy the father, but after a bit of research we realised that the mother is the aggressive one, not the father. It is quite normal for the female to drive the father from the nest when the babies arrive.

Poor Scampi had a hole bitten through his ear!

It was a couple of days before I saw a baby – it was bright red and clinging to Nippy’s underside. Nippy bounded around the cage with the poor baby bouncing around under her – she didn’t seem to understand what was going on.

We started to put down milk for them, and made sure that we didn’t disturb the nest. Most of the time we only knew that the babies were alive by the twittering noise from their nest (an upside down nest lid). After a few days a nearly blind baby wandered out of the cage, only for Nippy to rush out and haul it back into the nest. From then on, every few days we’d spot more than one baby at the same time – first one, then two, then three, then four, then five! It wasn’t until we cleaned the cage that we knew the final tally – six!

The babies now look like miniature adults. Soon they’ll have to be separated from their mother, and not long after from each other, otherwise Nippy and Scampi will become grandparents!

Scampi seems much happier now. He even seems to enjoy being stroked.

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Originally uploaded by Robert Seber.

Two of Nippy's babies.

Blog start

I figured it was about time I set up a blog, since I've read so much about it. Since our hamster Nippy became pregnant I think that I may have something to say that the world may be interested in!