Hello! I'm the proud wrangler of a 4 month old female Syrian called Perry. I've had various pets over the years like dogs and rabbits but not had anything this small before and so far it's been an experience! I had been toying with the idea of getting a pet for a bit more company but my working hours don't allow for most animals but the dawn and dusk habits of hamsters works wonderfully.
Perry was one of the 'rescue' hamsters at the local P@H - the only reason given was that she'd been there for a three months and they were trying to get her a home quickly. Not the best attitude but it worked on me. She's now living in two reasonable sized cages connected with tubes to allow her a good area to roam and has a running disk, sticks, 2 nests and other bits to play with. In an evening she's out in a vast cardboard playpen where she's got plenty of boxes and tubes to explore.
Unfortunately she's also a bit of an escape artist and on Monday night she worked her way out of a Ferplast Cube - guess she's stronger than I'd thought! She then found the only small hole in the wall and spent the next two nights exploring all the wall space and under floor areas around the living room. Following the advice on here I left food and water out by the hole and she'd been out to them on Tuesday night, and into her cage for more food, so I knew she was ok. Last night was a case of sitting very quietly on the sofa to wait when I heard her moving around in the walls, and after about an hour she appeared. When she'd got far enough from the hole I quickly covered it over and let her carry on exploring until she was in a good place for me to catch her. Very luckily she's showing no signs of injury and was fine when she'd had a big drink of water and a sniff around her cage. She then decided to try and stuff the entire contents of her food dish into her cheeks, hopefully not in anticipation of another escape!
And I though a hamster would be easy!
I'd like to say thanks to everyone who's contributed to the housing and health threads, your advice has helped a lot in the last few weeks, and a very big thank you to the people who wrote the "How to recapture an escaped hamster" thread - hopefully I won't need to refer to that again