New Picture and Self Annointing

The babies are now 13 days old. I have held them since they were 7 days old, and they are doing great. Their eyes have not opened yet, but they have a new set of quills. I held all four today, and one of them started to self-anoint. Self-annointing is where a hedgehog spits on itself. Hedgehogs will do this when new things are introduced to them. Scientists still do not know why they do they spit on themselves, though. There are 3 females and 1 male. One of the females is lighter than all the others, and the male is darker than the rest. The picture that I am posting is of these two.

Parents

Thought everybody might like to see what the parents of these hedgehogs look like.

Name: Scrat
Gender: Male




Name: Tiggy-Winkle
Gender: Female



Now, as you can see, these are both dark colors. But Scrat's pedigree indicates a long line of snowflakes, dark eyed whites, albino's, etc. And there are definitely different color shades among the babies. I am very curious to see what colors they will turn out to be!

Finally! Pictures!

Here's a picture that I took last night while Tiggy was trying to figure out who lifted up her nestbox.

All is well!

I lifted up the nestbox this morning, and all four hedgehogs were doing fine. Tiggy walked out and tried to figure out who lifted up her house. She either didn't care, or knew it was me, because she walked right back to her babies and started nursing them. While she was making sure everything was alright, the babies started crawling all over each other. It was a lot of fun to watch. Their eyes have not opened yet, and they will not open untill the hoglets are 16-23 days old. The eyes are blue right now, just like a baby bird. It makes the hedgehog look kinda weird when you look at head on.

New Arrivals!

1:10 PM July 14th: 5 African Pygmy Hedgehogs were born to Scrat and Tiggywinkle.
I accidentally found them when I heard Tiggywinkle eating something, which was strange because the food is on the other side of the tank. So I lifted up the nestbox, (where she happpened to be after tearing apart her cage around 8:00-9:00 this morning), and there she was eating one of the afterbirths! At this point there were 2 or 3 babies. I didn't look again for fear of scaring Tiggy. I risked a look at them the next morning, and found that she had 5 babies! After another day, one of the babies had wandered away from Tiggy and died. Tiggy then consumed the baby. She has now had the remaining 4 for 3 days, and they are doing very well. They crawl around and squeal all the time now. I haven't ventured to take pictures yet because I will need a flash. Hopefully I will be able to take pictures soon!