When we got home from our 4th of July camping trip this year, I got out of the truck as usual to let my husband know when to stop backing up the RV. Almost right away, I started screaming “STOP!! STOP!!†Directly behind his rear truck tire, (less than 6 inches away!) was a very small, grey chinchilla! In our driveway!
At first I thought it was a rat, since we have about 200 acres of woods behind our property. Not a big nasty city rat, the smaller ones that live in the woods, pet-store sized y’know? Then I saw that furry tail, and noticed that the ears were much bigger & rounder & it was a lot cuter & I knew what it had to be. I figured it must belong to one of the neighbors and had escaped & gotten frightened by the fireworks over the weekend.
It wouldn’t come out from under the truck, but moved to the center, so I went & checked with some of the neighbors. Nobody knew whose it might be and when I came back it had disappeared.
Very early one morning, about 2 weeks later, we started hearing noises coming from under the kitchen sink and the laundry room on the other side of that wall. Larger-than-a-mouse noises. Noises that did not suddenly stop when I walked over to the sink & opened the doors under it. Obviously, whatever was making these noises was used to being around humans and was not something the cat had brought in & turned loose so she could catch it again. My husband & I looked at each other & both said “OMG! You don’t suppose it could be that chinchilla that was in the driveway, could it?!â€
When it was back the next morning, we realized we were going to have to do something about it, but neither of us knew diddly-squat about chinchillas, except what they looked like. My husband bought some chinchilla food at the pet store and a humane-trap at the feed store to catch it in. That wound up taking several weeks, partly because we had a long-scheduled vacation at the beginning of August. We left it plenty of food & water and the cat was already boarded at a kennel during this time. And then partly because it is so little that it took my husband 3 tries to tweak the sensitivity on the trap spring. It was making it in there & getting the food & getting back out safely because it was not heavy enough to trip the trap door!
So anyway, it’s been “in custody†since August 18. We got one of the gi-normous, multi-level cages from the pet store & have both been studying up. We have no idea yet if it’s a boy or a girl, or how old it is. It’s quite a bit bigger than a chipmunk, but still quite a bit smaller than a squirrel. We’re taking it slowly, and when it’s awake it will now (mostly) stay where it is when we walk up to the cage. The first few days, it would immediately dive into the cave as soon as we would approach, so we are making progress. I figure being on its own so young can’t have helped the socialization any.
And actually, the fact that it *SURVIVED* that long amazed us. So I named it after another cute furry warrior – Wicket, the Ewok
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Topic: The accidental chinchilla (or You can't make this stuff up!) (Read 1353 times)