MyGerbil'sHistory

My name is Danica. For my twelfth birthday I got a couple of gerbils. We went to the shop and got them, they're boys, I've called them Zak and Zaphod. I got the names from my two favourite books; Zak from The Ship That Fell Like A Star and Zaphod from The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

This is their tank. Day two and they've already made themselves a load of tunnels!
As you can see we've put cardboard tubes and boxes in to help stop the tunnels from falling in, though you'd be surprised how it stays together, even without the cardboard.

Zaphod is much braver than his mate, Zak. He often comes out onto our hands, though my sister's more happy about holding him than me; I worry he's going to go up my sleeve or something!

Me and Mum were cleaning Zak and zaphod's tank out and look what we found in their nest!!! We found out later that the two that look like Zaphod are female and the black one's male.
In fact, Gerbils are known to have between four and six babies in a litter, so it's a bit surprising that Zaphod only had three.

Now the babies aren't babies anymore; they've grown quite a lot. Not as big as Mum and Dad yet, but they're getting there!
We've moved them all into a different tank, one without many shavings in it so that we can socialise with the babies easier and, mainly, so they don't get lost in the burrow.
Right, first things first: explore!

A bit later, the two girls started going dark; now their fur is patchy in colour, like a Tortoiseshell cat!
At the moment, one of them is noticably darker than the other, and I've decided to call the lighter one Cassie (short for Cassandra) and the darker one Cammie (short for Camigwen). The latter I got from a book called Dragon Prince, which I didn't actually like that much; bit too long winded for me. I'm not sure where I got the name Cassie from, I just like it and it went with Cammie!

Now the babies are old enough to be separated, at six weeks they are fully weaned; we don't want any more offspring thank you! Zak and Junior are going back to their old tank. But things can't settle down yet, because there was time for Zakky and Zaphy to have had mated again, before it was possible for us to split them up.
You see, if we had put Zak back in the first tank, before they had a chance to do this, than there would have been two problems. One: Zak would have got lonely, and two: he might not have accepted Junior as family; having been apart for a while.

We had trouble getting good pictures, so I'm not sure whether it's Zak, Junior, or one of each on these pics!
They're still cute though.

A little while later, Zaphod gave birth to one baby. What happened to the four to six thing?!
The new born is a boy, I've christened him Melville. This name is also from a book: Doctor Who, Endgame. Melville isn't a main character or anything; I just like the name.