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Old 10-14-2020, 06:33 AM  
Ria P
House of Hamsters
 
Join Date: Mar 2019
Location: Wiltshire, UK
Posts: 7,103
Default Re: Help taming our hideaway hermit hamster!

I also have a fairly reclusive young Syrian boy living in a Hamster Heaven.
Rory gets up very late around midnight and i've never seen him during the day. Like yours, he was more active at the beginning but once settled that changed a bit.
It may help to adjust his set up to make him more accessible for taming. I have taken all the HH shelves and tubes out and started with an empty cage.
Syrians usually love their houses and will move in. They need a large bottomless house with a removable roof so you can now and again check on them to make sure they're well and check their hoard for gone off fresh food without disturbing their nest. I use the inexpensive Ferplast guinea pig sized houses.
The house is in the left side of the cage, almost submerged into the substrate and plastikoted with a green/blue striped roof.
If i stay up till 01.00/02.00, chances are that i will see Rory coming to his door asking to come out to free roam in the room but i work and can't always stay up that late.
He wakes up around 22.00/22.30 because i can hear him scrunching and cluttering around inside his house and i had to try and tame him.
SO, once a week at around 22.30 i call his name and carefully remove the roof of his house and check if he's awake in which case i leave the roof off. If he's still fast asleep then i put the roof back on and try another night.
Ok, he's awake but minus his roof so he looks at me and sniffs around while i talk to him nicely. He sniffs for a while then grabs something to eat from his hoard and eventually climbs out of his house and goes into his coconut outhouse where he has a long and thourough wash. While he does that i put the roof back on and put everything back in its place.
He's not a hamster to be rushed and the whole sniffing, snacking, washing routine takes around 30-45 minutes.
Then he comes over to his open door and tries to climb out of his cage and onto my hand so i help him out and put him on my lap for some taming exercises. You can also take a hamster out by letting him walk into something like a jug. If he doesn't want to you could put a treat in it and if that doesn't work then he really doesn't want to come out and you have to try another night.
On my lap i started with stroking him and progressed to pick up exercises to gradually get him used to getting picked up.
After the exercises i let him roam around in a hamster proofed room and sit on the floor with him so he can still smell me. Roaming around is what he wants to come out for in the first place and he's so eager to get off my lap and onto the floor that we do this catch exercises where he starts to run like a wind up toy mouse and i catch/pick him up before he gets away and put him back to starting point to do a couple more reps.
It may be worth a try with your hamster but you need to be very patient which i'm sure you are to let the hamster do things in his own time.
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