Getting ready for harvest mice

This month marked the 4th year of me living in my little flat, and whilst it is small, it's served me well and I'm still thoroughly happy within its four walls.  It also marks four years for my marine aquarium, which is still going strong, with a trio of assorted fish, a coral banded shrimp and a fairly colossal hermit crab.

But as beautiful as the tank's inhabitants are, I've been fancying having a little more life to share the flat with me, so over the last couple of weeks I've been looking into harvest mice.  They're small, relatively easy to care for (so if I'm stuck in work until stupid o'clock day after day, they won't miss me), and are the dictionary defenition of cute.  They're also absolutely tiny, which suits the size of my flat down to the ground.

So today I've been assembling their tank, with a view to picking up a pair of little critters next weekend, and here are the results!

 

 

 

 

All in all, around £90 was spent on this setup.  This consisted of:

• A medium-sized glass tank with a single shelf and fine-mesh lid, for good visibility and security
• A food bowl and shallow water dish, for obvious reasons!
• A little wicker wigwam and ball, both for hiding purposes.
• A length of bark for climbing.
• A pair of wooden ladders/barriers, which can be shaped for various purposes.  One is shown above, the other is being saved for later.
• A nut selection in an edible wafer bowl.
• Another nut selection in a hollow bark toy.
• A herb tunnel, containing hay (also saved for later).
• And a bag of wood shavings and straw.

My parents have just been trimming the pear tree in the garden as well, so I popped by for some opportunistic branch gathering!  I picked a handful of branch ends, using three for the tank and saving an extra couple for later.  It might seem odd to be saving so much "for later", but I like the idea of giving my mice something new to explore further down the line.

 

So next weekend I'm aiming at picking up a pair of bucks to inhabit this little tank, and depending on what they enjoy I may have a slight reshuffle, but for now this is how things are looking!  Hopefully I'll be updating with some photos and maybe even a short video soon!