The long-tailed hamsters...

(Mum, if you are reading this, they were definitely hamsters)..


Ian and I have encountered what we have been calling 'long-tailed hamsters' before.  When the ducks were alive, their messy approach to feeding had attracted several...hamsters who had moved into the space underneath the duck bath.  The evidence for this was mainly archaeological: piles of droppings, stolen food, and a network of tunnels underneath the duck bath.  Humans and hamsters had pretty much agreed to avoid each other until our neighbour, whose house looks onto the bottom of our garden, mentioned that he had seen them running around our garden during the day, and that they were rather large.

Sadly, my suggestion that we solved our hamster problem by buying a cat, was vetoed on the basis that this was a slippery slope to our own re-enactment of 'there was an old lady who swallowed a fly'.  After discovering that so-called humane traps get their name from the fact that they fail to actually catch anything, we eventually resorted to placing packets of poison underneath the bath where there was no danger of the ducks pecking at it.  This, coupled with a twice daily regimen of sweeping up the stray duck food, seemed to solve the problem.

Fast-forward two years and we started to see signs that a family of hamsters had moved into the big shed.  They were pretty clear signs too, if I'm honest.  These hamsters hadn't just moved in, but also thrown a welcome party and chewed their names into the front door.  In addition to the shed renovations which had provided them with a front door even when the shed doors were shut, there were also several evenings when we heard suspicious scrabbling coming from the big shed while putting Tiberius and Sibelius to bed in the small shed next door.  

suspicious....

As before, we followed a laissez-faire approach to pest control until the problem had to be confronted head-on.  This happened on Sunday morning when I encountered several hamsters head-on while rummaging in the shed for a trowel. 

The reason for the hamsters was a forgotten bag of pygmy goat mix.  This had been added to our first hay order to meet the minimum price for home delivery  and had been relegated to the shed since the boys turned their noses up at it.   Now a large hole allowed a landslide of food to spread across the floor.  Possibly we just hadn't offered this food to the boys correctly since on Sunday they fell on it like manna from goaty heaven.  For future reference, I know now that the way to make food appetising for them is to mix it with tiny nuggets of poo and spread it out on the floor.

Although this was helpful for the general cleaning up, I had to balance this against the possibility they would actually explode.  So after a few minutes I turfed the boys out of the shed so that I could move in with the heavy-duty cleaning equipment.*

*our largest brush and some gardening gloves.



My helpers 'cleaning' up

I remember thinking at the time that Tiberius and Sibelius had taken this ousting well, given their normal frenzied reaction to food.  I subsequently discovered that they had moved straight from hoovering up goat mix inside the shed, to breaking into a bag of hay on the grass outside. 

Anyway, now that all stray food has been successfully swept and poison put down strategically underneath the shed and behind the log store, hopefully the hamsters will be moving on soon...




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