The Why of Hamsters

Bill of the Birds asked, “So. What’s the point of this animal?”

I’ll admit that Bill of the Birds is not alone. That the whole idea of hamsters eluded me for a long time. Regular readers of this blog know that I really don’t need a whole lot more to care for. I won’t bore you with a list of current denizens. Two hamsters threaten to tip our house into the realm of menagerie. I’ve never been that enamored of the idea of a small rodent that runs on a wheel. But Chinese dwarf hamsters are really, really cool.

To start with, they’re cute in an undomesticated way. They look most of all like a young white-footed mouse who’s had a tail-abbreviating incident. They’re a gorgeous smoke gray with a dark racing stripe down the back. They are not as bug-eyed as Syrian hamsters or mice.

They’re unexpectedly fun to watch, especially in pairs. Our sisters—Phoebe’s Vetiver and Liam’s Verbena—get along very well. They even do tandem runs on the Silent Spinner. The technology of small animal keeping has improved quite a bit from the squeaky metal cage wheel days when the critters had to be kept in the basement lest they keep the whole house awake. Silent Spinners are the bomb!

They give a young boy something small and helpless to look after, to feed and clean up after.
But most of all they cuddle spectacularly well. Being nocturnal animals, they get jiggy somewhere around 11 PM, and they’re still going strong, streaking around their tank like lightning bolts, when Phoebe leaves for school at 6 AM. But when the kids get back from school, dog-tired, the hammies are sleeping, and are perfectly happy to go on snoozing in the warm hands of a child. Oh, they’ll wake up briefly and do cute things like clean their whiskers and feet while sitting in the palm of a hand
Which is disarmingly adorable, just seeing this creature going about its private grooming regimen in your hand.
But mostly they sleep.

Please.

How can a little animal be this adorable? How can it trust me, this enormous carnivorous primate, so completely as to fall back to sleep while I cuddle it, stroke its belly with a gentle fingertip? Dunno. They just do. And that is the magic, the point, of Chinese dwarf hamsters.

I have other ideas about the point of hamsters.

What About Those Hamsters?

It is time for hamsters. Magnificent scenery has its place, but so do small furred rodents in this big old goofy world.

It’s not often that one gets to track a pet from conception, but our acquisition of two Chinese dwarf hamsters was a premeditated thing. Phoebe found an Ohio breeder on Oobly.com and began a correspondence. As a result, Kacie introduced Sage, her female CDH,

to Lil’ Man and a romance blossomed. Lil’ Man was obviously well-equipped to become a father. I would call him Lil' Big Man. What IS it with those rodents and their wedding tackle?

The hamsters were quite compatible and began sleeping together and it wasn’t too much more than a month before we got an excited email from Kacie with a picture of Sage looking, as she put it, like a furry ping-pong ball. The next day she was blessed with five pink squirmers.

Here they are on Day 3.

On Day 4, they looked like tenrecs. (hamster is facing left, fyi.)

By Day 9, they were looking more like rodents.

That is some seriously fast development, from what was basically an embryo to this in nine days!

Day 19. Proper cute and furry.

All hamster photos courtesy Kacie.

Although Phoebe started out as the hot and heavy hamster lover, when Liam found out there were five in the litter, he asked if he could have one. Of course, since Phoebe would be getting a female, he wanted a boy. Nuh-uhhhn. I explained that if there were going to be two hamsters in the house, they’d both have to be the same sex. There followed a discussion of the dangers of inbreeding. Liam got it before I had to invoke McKenzie Phillips and her Papa John.

I met Kacie in East Liverpool, which wasn’t far from West Liberty, WV, where I was working for the week. She was so sweet--she tried just to give me the hamsters, and this after breeding them special for us, and putting daily work into civilizing them, acclimating them to handling. Amazing. She brought all four girls along and let me pick. I picked two who seemed friendliest and didn’t nip me right off the bat.

After waiting since Easter, Phoebe was over the moon to finally be cradling her own CDH. She has named hers Vetiver. Liam was completely charmed. He's cuddling Verbena, his choice of a name.

Any misgivings I had about having two more creatures to care for dissolved as I watched my babies welcome their babies. I am all about encouraging tenderness in children, and there is nothing better for that than giving them little pets to care for. Well, now, a baby brother or sister is real good for that, but this mare's out to pasture.

And there was someone else who turned out to be very into hamsters, too. He was so into them, he couldn’t get to nothing else.

As I write, Chet Baker is shuttling from sunspot to shade, sunspot to shade. He's like a little black soapstone carving, radiating heat. There. I snuzzled him for you. Never fear, more Bacon adorability is just ahead.

There's Bacon on Your Board Game

It froze last night, one of the earliest frosts I can remember. It only hit 32, but it was a showy frost, with white rime on everything and thin crackly ice on the pond and birdbath. We're usually OK through Halloween, and we had one year in the mid 90's where it still hadn't frozen at Christmastime; the mandevillas were blooming weakly as I wrapped presents. Bill of the Birds has been most diligent in preparing my Garden Pod for the winter. He put his mind to finding some way to plug the circular vents around its base, and settled on cutting plugs from a big sheet of insulating construction foam. Fabulous! The Pod is packed with refugees from the frost. It is so cold out there that I thought I would warm you with a heat-radiating doggeh.

Chet Baker comes by his name, "Little CatDog," quite honestly. So many things he does: perching on the back of chairs and couches, leaping lightly up into your lap the second you sit down; taking your seat the second you stand up; and planting himself on whatever you're trying to read or do on the floor are cat traits.

So it was no surprise to enter the room on a sunny afternoon to find him firmly ensconced on the kids' ongoing Monopoly game.
Whut? I, Chet Baker, can play Monopoldy too. I am the boot. The Scottie dog is already taken.


However it is a little lonesome to play Monopoldy when the chirrun are at school. So I am here to hold Liam's place for him.

The autumnal sun feels good on my almost five-year-old bones. Mether, were you aware that the Boston terrier was first developed as a heat-retaining bedwarmer? This is why we are black. Red brindle Boston terriers radiate too much heat, and are not as good at warming beds. This is why the black ones have prevailed.

Chet Baker, you just made that up. That is a just-so story.


Well, it is true. My grandmother, Maeve, told me that when I was little. I am gathering heat in my solar panels for this evening, when I will fulfill my breed destiny by crawling under the kevers. You will see.

The Hotdog Brothers

Oh, how I loved watching my boys, the Hotdog Brothers, working the river together. There was so much to see.
I love this shot.
And this one. Liam passed some of the time by drawing.


Liam proved a slightly intermittent paddler, but Bill was more than able to pilot the huge loaded canoe himself. It might have been nice to have a little more power in the bow, but he didn't complain. Phoebe and I needed to go full bore just to keep up with him. He's got guns under those sleeves.

Every once in awhile, a man needs to rest, however.

Liam was charged with making sure they didn't run aground. But the sun and trickling water worked their magic on him, too, and his head dropped lower and lower.

Soon he was sound asleep.


I cannot tell you how much he looks like my father here. How many times have I seen my dad in just this pose. Never in a canoe, mind you; he was an Iowa farm boy, wasn't much for water. But asleep, chin on chest, hands clasped? Oh yes.

Campsite Scenes

There are many times when I use my 300 mm. telephoto lens to photograph my family. I'm not a fan of the typical travel snapshot, in which a person stands grinning in front of a sign, a precipice, a statue. Blaa. No information content, no artistry, no interest, no life.

So when I crawled out of the tent and saw this scene unfolding below I deployed the long lens for some paparazzo-style documentation of Liam self-actualizing.

Liam loves, loves, loves to cook. He is almost always between me and the saute pan or mixing bowl. Perhaps because my mother would only let me rinse bowls, never allowing me access to the messy stuff, I try to let Liam stir and mix and pour. It's hard, I'll grant Mom that, to stand by and let somebody do something wrong, or messily, but how else is he going to learn to do it right? And how hard is it to wipe up afterward, if he gains confidence and surety in the process?

Jim and Nick asked Liam to mind the sausages. And mind them he did.


I love how he's holding the tongs here. He doesn't quite get that tongs are long so you don't get burned. Had I been hovering, I'd have shown him how to hold them. But I stayed back.


Hmm. Is that done?


We all agreed that the sausages that morning tasted extra good, and wondered aloud who had cooked them so masterfully. It was me, Mommy!

Later, I looked up from packing the tent and sleeping bags to see this fine example of anthropoid ape grooming/bonding behavior. Out came the telephoto.


Yes, candid shots are ever the best.

Threading the Needle with Bill of the Birds

Not only was the slot canyon spookily magical, but it offered some fabulous photo-ops.

There came a point where it narrowed down to a squeeze. Now the fun begins!

I often wish I were taller than I am. This was not one of those times.

The slot canyon narrowed down to a hole, blocked by a huge boulder. You had to crawl under the boulder to get through. It was tight. I was regretting the extra biscuits, but I made it.

Come on, Daddy! You can do it! I just did it!

Of course, Liam did it in seconds. Little snot. Then he climbed the wall just for fun.



Bill of the Birds examines his options. He don't much like that crawl-under thing.

Nick suggests climbing the wall a ways back and coming along the ledge instead. So Bill handed us his camera and binocs and went for it.

This was not an option I was wild about. The ledge kind of melted away in a Dali-esque drip as it neared the passage. Bill soon reaches a point where he can go neither up nor down, forward nor back. Oh, drat. You guys go on. I'll just stay and feed the burying beetles.


Back to Plan A. In order to squeeze through beneath the boulder, Bill has to wriggle on his back, like a sea otter. I went through on my hands and knees.


He's going to make it.
I think we should do this slot canyon hike every year. It will keep us honest when the Christmas cookies come around.

This post is dedicated to all the Little People out there. Sometimes we rule.

For those needing another Chet Baker fix, as well as a splendid photographic and video run-down of October 11's Big Sit from our tower, go visit Jim McCormac's excellent blog, Ohio Birds and Biodiversity. There is a picture of Chet there that will make you smooch your screen.

Slot Canyon Magic

Every now and then I think about my favorite days ever. A few stand out in memory, like the day I took Phoebe, 17 mo. old and just walking, in a bike trailer along the coastal trail in Monterey, California. I remember every detail, every sparkle on the water from that day.

The Slot Canyon Adventure on our Missouri River canoe trip in Montana certainly ranks up with the Monterey day. We'd camped under some cottonwoods, and got up the next morning to go into the most magical of canyons. As its name suggests, a slot canyon narrows down until it's a squeeze to get through, making for a whole lot of fun. That's a whole 'nother post, seeing Bill of the Birds through that canyon.

The view across the river included some sheer cliffs and a prairie falcon nest!
Bill of the Birds had brought his spotting scope along, and we watched the falcons tend their young.

A bull snake greeted us at the campsite. Liam spotted it first!


Our guide Nick caught the placid snake and relocated it a short distance away. Bull snakes climb after birds' nests, as rat snakes do back home in Ohio.

What a gorgeous creature. He looked like someone tried to make him a T. Rex for Halloween.

This canyon had it all. Gorgeous wildflowers with extraneous minutiae (Nick and Liam).


There's a rock wren in this picture. Take my word for it.


Gumbo lilies, a kind of primrose, spread their huge white flowers along the cliffsides and tops. I scrambled up to this one and confirmed my suspicion that it would have a heavenly fragrance! Barely any leaves, any plant at all--just a huge flower that looked like someone had dropped a Kleenex on the scree.

Rock pigeons nested along the canyon walls, filling the space with their eerie moans. It was as if the rock walls were breathing, weeping.


We took turns shooting pictures of each other in the great arch atop the canyon.


Here's Bill of the Birds, posing.


I don't know why we feel we have to stand, face the camera and smile, but we do, again and again, even though it makes for some pretty prosaic shots.
To me, the rock looked like a big camel, or a wonderful turkey.
Al Batt, humorist, writer, exemplary human being, was along on our trip, by the grace of Mountain Bluebird Trails and the Great Falls Chamber of Commerce. Such a gift they gave us, letting us experience Montana's Russell Country in this way. Al barely fit in the arch.

Back at camp, Al and Bill muttered about needing some yaller mustard for these here hot dogs hmmmmmm
I don't think there was a pop culture, music or movie reference that Al didn't get and fire right back, and they flew thick and fast. Not to mention his wide-ranging knowledge of natural history, and the obvious mutual affection between Al and our kids. What a wonderful traveling companion!

Oh, thank you, Russell Country. I hope my readers are inspired by this post to book their own trip on the Missouri.