2002-02-05 - 11:11 p.m.

Hooray for Ince!

I haven't talked about this, mainly because I've been afraid to jinx it.

Ince the hamster is pregnant! After the pissing and moaning I did here I decided to try for baby hamsters with Ince and Pooka one last time. I assumed that I'd struck out again when, a couple days ago, I noticed Ince looking decidedly plump. While cleaning her cage, I took a good look at her and decided that she was clearly in the family way. Pooka, on the other hand, looked like a washout.

While I was very pleased that Ince was pregnant, I was also very worried. Ince is not the most stable of hamsters. She is very jumpy and is once of the few hamsters that have actually bitten me.

She is also weird and obsessive. Let me explain what I mean.

Sometimes hamsters get these obsessive habits - things they do over and over again. Most of the time, they don't make any sense. Sometimes they are harmless, sometimes not.

Snowy, Ince's great-grandfather, just ran around in circles in the bottom of his cage. It didn't seem to to him any harm - in fact he was the most muscular hamster I've ever seen. However, it made me dizzy just to watch him.

Pooka the hamster likes to run in her wheel, but while she runs she like to stick her head out. This means that every half-turn of the wheel she get bonked on the head. Pooka is a sweet hamster but not very smart, and with all those smacks on the skull she's probably not getting any smarter.

Ince, on the other hand, likes to dig. When she gets in the mood she will dig at the corner of her cage tirelessly. Hamsters love to burrow, but Ince isn't going anywhere - the bottom of her cage is glass supported by steel. Undaunted, Ince continues to dig. And dig. And dig some more.

A few weeks ago, I was horrified to see a reddish brown substance smeared on the walls of Ince's cage. It was blood - a lot of it. What was going on? Had Ince miscarried some babies? No. Ince had a cut on one of her fingers, probably opened by her incessant digging. Even though it was bleeding quite profusely she continued scratching in the corner of her cage maniacally.

Who'd have thought so much blood could have come out of such a tiny animal?

So, Ince is metal. This doesn't necessarily mean that she'll be a bad mom...

By my calculations, her babies were due sometime today, but just before midnight on Feb. 4 she started to deliver.

I've kept hamsters for 30 years, but I've never seen a hamster mother actually have her babies until now. New mothers are very nervous so you should always leave them alone as much as possible. This should have gone DOUBLE for a Nervous Nelly like Ince, except for the fact that her cage is sitting right next to my computer and the silly thing actually moved her next to the front corner of her cage, right where I am sitting this minute.

Newborn baby hamsters are very tiny and wormlike, blind and hairless. Their skin seems to be transparent so you can see their internal organs and stuff.

At one point Ince seemed to be eating something dark and bloody. It didn't look like a baby hamster - was it the placenta? Well, whatever it was, watching Ince eat it was a gross-out. Kind of kills the old appetite.

The next few days are going to be a test of my nerve - trying to see the babies but not offend their irrational mother. I've seen hamster mothers kill babies, and I don't want to scare Ince into something like that. Also, I'll be crossing my fingers, hoping that at least one of them has gray fur. Ince is mainly white so I can't tell if she has any gray-fur blood in her or not. She could well be black like her father Winky.

Time will tell. I will keep you updated.