Today all of us toyvoyagers decided to help Sara with some of her chores around the house. Usually Wednesday's for her are pretty busy, but this one was way busier than normal since they had so many public holidays in a row... first off Sara had to clean the mouse mansion - once she had it all clean and put new bedding in we decided to sit in it to relax... not really that comfy, but they make burrows in it...
...once that was all done we had to top up the food for the two other mice in separate cages... they're wild mice that Sara caught in her house... since they had been reliant on Sara's food she couldn't release them to their deaths... so Sara keeps them just like the other mice but in separate cages... here we are on top of the cages...
The mouse cage on the left is the boy mouse, who is called Mr. Jingles, the cage on the right is a female mouse (not put together for obvious reasons) called Dorothy...
Sara actually got a photo of Dorothy who came out to eat once we changed over her food and water. It was from a distance because she's scared very easily... this is what she looks like...
...very very small isn't she?...
Next on the list of chores we had to finish off the mouse cage... here we are preparing to put the mice back in their mansion...
...there's four mice in there, can you see them all? Two of them are pretty old now, the large black and white one (more brown and white now) is called Moo, the white one is Charlotte, the tan colored one is Puff (her sister died just recently - she was identical but had a tiny white spot on her back side)... and the small white one with black spots is called Choc Chip... Moo and Charlotte are around 18 months old, which is pretty good... the average life span of a domestic mouse is around 24 months...
Finally... the mouse mansion is complete... see the mice in there?
Once that was complete, we had to get the washing baskets ready, so we had a whole heap of laundry to fold... Sara hates folding laundry so she was happy to get some help...
Now that's all done, and another load of laundry is in the washing machine, time to move on... time to clean out the bird aviary... it's in the kitchen, Sara's got lots of finches but they're all very beautiful... here's me in front of the aviary...
In Bree's photo one of the birds was caught mid air... here's a close up of the zebra finch flying in her photo...
...now we got to clean out the bird cage... we do it twice a week and the birds love when they're cage is all clean... here I am in front of all the stuff ready to go back into the cage...
...as for the birds, some of the birds are quite unique. Zebra finches are very common everywhere in the world. But Sara has some pretty unique ones, she's got star finches (yellow and red faced), gouldian finches (which are endangered in the wild - and extremely hard to breed), spice finches, diamond doves (which is the world's smallest dove)... and society finches which are a bird that was never found in the wild - it was a domestically bred bird, so it's very handy to have in mixed aviaries especially with breeding, as if you do it right you can have the society finches take over and raise the babies that were abandoned. Here's some photos of the finches closer up... can you figure out which bird is which?...
...Sara also has some "ground dwelling" birds at the bottom... also good in aviaries, they're called button quails they're both of the silver variety...
Something exciting... is we hear some... odd sounds come out of the cage recently... Sara says two of her gouldian finches actually have had fertile eggs that have hatched. There's sadly only one baby remaining... and it's sure noisy. Sara's not sure how old it is or what it looks like since gouldian finches are extremely hard to breed since they'll easily abandon the nest. Even when Sara was taking a photo of all of us in front of the aviary one of the gouldians sent out a "warning" chirp that made all the birds freeze and Sara didn't want to bug them too much. Sara promises when the baby leaves the nest she'll get photos of the baby and us so we can see what a baby gouldian finch looks like. :-)
If you can't tell Sara is an animal lover, she also has fish, and she has a dog... since they're not cleaning the dog right now there's no photos helping with that... Sara put the dog in the kennel to get the photos since she's still a puppy and in training. So here we are with her 1 year old beagle, Anni...
Last but not least it's time to finish off the washing, so we all headed outside and "hung out"...
...after what seemed like forever, all the clothes were on the line... it got very very windy while we were outside but we were protected by one of the kid toys Sara's got outside for Andrew (her son)... here's all the clothes on the line...
...now it's time to rest... it's been a long long day! write again soon mom! <3
