[babyboos]

Close all doors and windows, and try to figure out what room your hamster is in. If you are having trouble, try placing a bowl of food in each room. The hamster is bound to get hungry, so you will be able to tell which room he's in by whichever food dish is touched. Or in each room of your house, count out exactly 10 sunflower seeds, and place them near a corner. Every few hours check to see if the pile of seeds in any given room is smaller; if so, then your hamster will probably be close by.



Once you have narrowed down your search, start looking under chairs, beds, in shoes... put yourself into the frame of mind of the hamster. Syrians are wall huggers tend to keep one side of their body to a vertical surface so check all around the perimeter of the room and especially corners. Also, put the hamster's cage down somewhere in that room - he might recognise it as home, and climb back in to his food and his nest.



You could get creative/inventive and devise your own traps. One of the best ways is to get some sort of deep bucket with a ramp heading up to it, with some food as bait. The hamster will fall into the bucket, and then cannot climb out. I use books for the ramps and apple in the bucket as it is nice and smelly - also a trail of seeds up the books seems to work well. Be sure to put some bedding material in the bottom of the bucket to soften his fall.



If your hamster's wheel is really squeaky, put it in the middle of the room that you suspect your hamster to have escaped into. Once you hear the squeaking, you can run over to the wheel and catch your hamster if you are very quick!