Now departing on flight 327

I have, unfortunately, another departure to report. Last night, March 27, we lost Ingrid, the last of our mice. She had been slowing down lately and not eating as much but when I checked on her in the evening I found her uninterested in her dinner and breathing heavily in her little castle. I picked her up and held her while she took her last breaths and tried my best to comfort her and let her know that she wasn't alone as she died. 

She was the least troublesome out of the batch of three mice, including her, Hermione, and Josephine, that I most recently acquired. When I got them they must have been fairly young as they easily (and regularly) slipped through the bars of their cage to scramble about on top of the cage. 

It was because they were able to get through the bars of the cage that we lost - and then found - Josephine when she made it off the top of the cage and disappeared in the house for four days. She was hungry and quite thirsty when we found her but somehow she survived being loose in a house with two dogs and two cats. She was the first to pass away several months after her big adventure. 

Hermione suffered from skin irritation and was on daily medication to help calm her itchiness but even with all her skin problems and frequent trips to the vet she managed to outlive Josephine; she was the second to pass away. 

Ingrid outlasted them all, living to the ripe old age of nearly 3 years, about a year past the average life expectancy of pet mice, who generally live one to two years. Ingrid never went on walkabout throughout the house, and didn't have to visit the vet with any regularity, choosing instead to exercise on her wheel and build elaborate hidey holes in the bedding in her cage instead of getting into trouble. 

We will definitely miss her, as we miss all the animals that have passed through the Unfarm, but we are glad she lived as long as she did and take comfort in the fact that she never ended up as the snake food she was most likely destined to be without us. Have a safe flight, Ingrid.

Three [escape artist] mice

We have three new mice here on the Unfarm. Recently my two previous mice, Evangeline and Francine, passed away and the mouse cage sat empty with a vacancy sign out front that must have attracted the attention of three new mice who I have named Hermione, Ingrid, and Josephine. (I have been going through the alphabet with mouse names and have already had an Angela, Bernadette, Caroline, Daphne, Evangeline, Francine and Gemima so H, I, and J were up next.)  In addition, as the mice are small and relatively unobtrusive it no longer really phases my parents when I show up with three new ones. Thus Hermione, Ingrid, and Josephine came to live on the Unfarm with very little fuss involved. I suspect that had I also brought home a hamster in addition to the three mice there would have been a bit more uproar so I wisely refrained. Besides, the mice were most likely going to end up as dinner for some snake so I really am in the business of saving lives here. 

Josephine appears to be the oldest of the three as she is the largest. Hermione and Ingrid are likely much younger and upon settling them into their new home I quickly discovered a problem with this: they are so little that they easily fit through the bars of the mouse cage. I checked up on them a few minutes after getting them settled and found only Hermione and Josephine in the cage; Ingrid was running around the outside of the cage. Fortunately I quickly caught her before she could escape into the rest of the house. Unfortunately, all three of my various mouse cages have bars with the same amount of spacing between them so the only way to fix the problem is to set the cage up high on a rolling cart and hope that the height and lack of anything to use to climb down to the ground will deter them from getting lost should they decide to escape. Well, that and to feed them well and hope that they grow fast and soon are unable to squeeze themselves through the bars any longer.

I am, by nature, a bit paranoid and overly anxious so I do check on the mice and do a head count several times a day to make sure that no one has escaped and up until a few days ago the combination of the height of the cage off the ground and the fact that there is really nothing exciting outside the cage (no castle house, no wheel, no food or water bowls) seemed to keep them safely inside the cage. A few days ago, though, I did my morning head count only to discover that one mouse was missing. But she was nowhere to be found on the outside of the cage or the top of the cart so surely I must have miscounted. Nope. There were definitely only two mice in the cage. Becoming frantic I began looking around the room in frustration as there are probably a million places a small mouse could hide and I had no idea where to start. Before I could go into a full blown panic I noticed some mouse droppings on my tabletop easel on the second shelf of the rolling cart. Further investigation revealed a rather frightened looking Hermione crouched on top of the easel. How she got down there I will probably never know. It's not like there were a bunch of tiny mouse sized sheets all tied together and thrown out of the cage dangling down to the second shelf. I retrieved her and placed her back in the safety of the cage (we have cats, after all, who would probably love to catch one of the mice outside the cage.)

Since her misadventure, none of the mice have ventured outside the cage (at least not to my knowledge). Hermione did pop her head outside the cage bars last night but when I peered at her and said, "where do you think you're going?" she pulled her head back in and went about her mousy business. I am hoping that they soon grow too big to get through the bars, much like Josephine, and I can stop worrying so much about them. Until then I plan to continue my head counts and abundant feeding schedule. 

Josephine

Hermione, the escape artist

Ingrid, our original escape artist