April

Babu’s adult coat isn’t growing evenly. It has grown over his head and shoulders and along his tummy and sides but his rump and back are still covered in his baby fur. There is one patch on his back which is growing like the rest of his coat and as a result he’s looking a little moth eaten.

I weighed Babu and Ambaa again tonight. Babu has put on nearly 100g this week and is now nearly 600g. Ambaa has put on slightly less and is now 50g lighter than Babu. Babu is visible the larger now. I checked their weights against the records I made of Kali. My records show that Kali was a lot heavier than either of them at this age. My records are showing that Kali was more than100g heavier than Babu at about this age which can’t be right. Male Pouched Rats are bigger than the females. All I can assume is that Kali was a few weeks older than I thought. I’ll double check all the details and see if I can work out where the difference comes from. Once I have the accurate figures I’ll update the weight chart.

They are still reluctant to come out of their house. I had to do a lot of coaxing to get them to a position where I could pick them up. They hated it but I had to do it so they could be cleaned out. However unlike Kali neither try to bite me. It hasn’t occurred to them yet and I hope it doesn’t. They are so much tamer than Kali was at this stage so I’m hopeful that as they get to trust me they will get tamer and tamer. I will persevere with handling them. They will eventually learn that no harm will come to them.

Like Kali they are very alert at breakfast time. They’ve already learnt when breakfast is and they are usually up and about and waiting when I bring it to them. They will both take monkey nuts from my hand and Babu will eat seeds from the palm of my hand. Ambaa is still a bit too shy to do that.

I got the rats out of their house tonight so I could clean it out and weigh them. They were panicked by being handled and were very hard to hold on to. Once I’d put them down again they calmed down quite quickly and set about exploring the room. Unfortunately there are many things they can hide under and it was very difficult to catch them again. The male is a lot bolder and this makes him easier to catch. The female just hides and I had to move the furniture to flush her out of her hiding places. She became quite frightened and I was lucky to get her back into her house.

The male weighs 500g and the female weighs 440g. I’ll have to check my records to see how much Kali weighed at this age. I’m sure she was bigger.