Rat is an empty nester 5 February, 2010

Wee? Me? Snowflake gets into social media

Tragedy befell Snowflake this week, as Jane and a tearful Kira took her babies back to the pet shop from which she came. Kira was surprised, and perhaps a little mollified, to find herself presented with 20 Euros for the eight babies we handed over.

One ratling remains behind with mum. As yet unnamed, she is black, with little pink paws and a white tip to her tail. She is already happily shoulder-tame, and Kira is making renewed efforts to bring the albino mum to the same domesticated state.

Having successfully encouraged the rat to perch on her shoulder, she demanded an audience with Granddad Bernard using the Skype video facility. All was well until Granddad asked for the rat to be brought nearer the laptop’s built-in camera so he could pretend to scratch its ears.

Snowflake, unsure of the proper protocols for effective use of social media, left her own comment by grabbing the top of the laptop and urinating over the screen and the keyboard.

When will they be whinnied? 24 January, 2010

Eyes open and running around

Kira, anxious to play with the baby rats, asked today how long it will be before they are whinnied.  After working out that she means ‘weaned’, we calculate it’s about two more weeks.

After that, the pet shop owner promises to take them back. He’s a little embarrassed, not least because his own Christmas rat from the litter has also given birth. Clearly he had males and females mixed for longer than was advisable, indicating he is not as familiar with the rat undercarriage as he ought to be.

Kira happily and euphemistically tells everyone who asks that Snowflake got married before she arrived in the house. Anyone who tries to patronise her about this, thinking her ignorant of the more intricate details of mammalian procreation is in for a shock, though. She is more than capable of describing the activities of the neighbourhood cats who ‘climb on each other’ given the opportunity.

Baby rats are very cute, there’s no getting around it. It’s been two weeks; yesterday most of them opened their eyes, and today they all started scampering around the cage. We took this as a good opportunity to clean the cage, and even moved them out onto the table top, but Snowflake went out, picked them up and moved them back in. We didn’t want to upset her, so we cleaned up around her.

The biggest battle right now is to persuade the kids that they aren’t all keeping a couple each. We’ll let you know how that goes.

Counting rats … 10 January, 2010

… is very hard, when they are all buried in wood shavings, snuggled up together or wriggling round under their under-age mum on a milk-hunt. I can’t definitively fulfil yesterday’s promise of telling you how many of the little critters there are.

How poor little Snowflake manages is hard to guess. She must be being sucked dry. We’re feeding her every kind of food we think will help build milk production – fats, proteins, vitamins high among them.

As to the all-important question of how many rats make a litter?  Six, definitely. Nine, says one close observer. Eleven, says another, though we suspect double-counting. When they move around independently we’ll get a better idea.

Sunset over Troodos, from NE

We’re keeping the rats in the dark, so there are no cute pictures yet.  To make up for that, here’s a sunset over Troodos.

Sunset over Troodos