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Sunday 1 July 2012

Tiny Roborovskis


ROBOROVSKIS
 
are the tiniest little hamsters in the world...

 
Just 5cm/2" long fully grown, they curl up into pingpong-sized furballs!


Inky-dinky on the palm of your hand...



Robos are famously hard to tame, but this is a bold little baby...


Smiley...


Grumpy...


"Hello!"


The true meaning of "white-out"... (Zzzzzzzz..!)



Squeak squeak squeak!


Aaah!


HOPING YOU ALL HAD A GLORIOUS
(AND NOT TOO HOT)
WEEKEND...
(ROBOROVSKIS DON'T LIKE THE HEAT EITHER!)



8 comments:

Anonymous said...

So adorable!! They are just so itty bitty and cute! Our weekend has been so very hot.

bugerlugs63 said...

Ha! Elsie named your offspring "Itty and Bitty" . . . because they are ;-)
These are great pics, if I ever get a good camera I could do some better photos of my lot.
Have you ever noticed how their top few whiskers are black? Is this so they don't disturb their vision do you think?
Have you tried to comment yet . . . all my regulars are back today with comments.
Have a good day Gledwood, with love x

jams o donnell said...

What handsome little devils!

Gledwood said...

Elsie: aren't they amazing. And so bloody little the bastards can easily squeeze under many a shut door if they so choose!
It's been a bit too hot here, but no hotter than 80 or 85F. London is just not designed for heat. The buses are real sweatboxes, with barely-opening windows. Buildings too hot in summer... yet nothing is designed for a truly cold winter either... roads and railways rapidly go down at the vaguest hint of snow... Thank God we don't get whirlwinds, typhoons and hurricanes!

Bugerlugs: they're not my lot though being robos they all "look the same"... I only ever had 3 robos. All girls, though for a long while initially I was convinced Baby Itchy was a boy because she kept on trying to mount Spherical.

2 bullet-shaped runts Itchy (being the smallest and the only 1 of 3 I managed to hand-tame so I could pick her up without her instantly bunnyhopping about 300ft in hamster dimensions and pinging across the floor... Bashful who was almost as tiny and lived up to her name. And Spherical, who might well have been a generation older or even mother 2 those 2. Who was a proper tubby ball-shaped roborovski. She outlived the other 2 but was very wary of me. She didn't mind me putting my hand in and would eat straight away when I put food on the floor and tidied the place up. But like many robos she just hated being picked up. It's not walking on the hand they seemed to dislike so much as the hand closing round them. Even with Itchy I often got her to walk into a toilet tube and then tipped that onto my hand, she was much happier with that.

Skittish swines!

Jams: I wish I had some new ones. I'm thinking of getting a giant stack-n-store box to keep the lil bastards in~!! ;-

Gledwood said...

Bugerlugs: re whiskers, I've always considered whisker-sense to be the robbies' 6th sense. Just as taste and smell are NOT the same to humans, so the sense of touch and the Whisker-Sense are NOT the same to robos. Whisker-sense allows them to run at top speed down a twisting underground passageway without ever bumping into the side. In fact the only thing they ever bumped into in the dead of night (which I illuminated with a fireglow bulb, by which they could not see, as robos are immune to red light, just as we are blind to infrared light)... they'd bump into my hand, not knowing it was there, but never into anything else, which is pretty bloody clever considering how they ping about so in pitch dark... To me their whiskers definitely give them a further sense which is too sophisticated merely to be considered an extension of the sense of touch.

A person arguing whisker-sense is just "touch" would by the same token have to present the chemical analysis of taste and smell in humans as one and the same thing. It's well known that much of our experience of the "flavour" of food in fact revolves around the smell of the matter in question rather than its favour. And the same mechanisms are put in operation for both smell and taste. If one is going to draw a distinction there, one must further distinguish between the sensation a robo feels from stroking its fur and the far more complex sense-impression lent by its whiskers, which to human dimensions stick out a good 2 ft either side of the little beast!

Bev said...

I love them.How many do you have?i want one to.do they squeek like mice?

Gledwood said...

I used to have 3 until they all died about 3 years ago. They don't really squeak, it's more a honking noise, if you imagine a chipmunk honking, that would be about right. I had to look all over London even to find robbies as some pet shops refuse to stock them. Because they're too small, too fast and not tame enough!! But I loved them. They were the best pets I ever had!

Syd said...

They are so cute. I remember dear Spherical. I used to so like hearing about your hamsters.