A Discovery in the Harvest Mice Enclosure!

When cleaning one of our Harvest Mice enclosures this week, the keepers were delighted to find some incredibly cute baby mice hidden inside the nest!
The adult mice build their nests from materials they collect up such as the hay and leaves provided for them inside the enclosure.
The baby mice are born pink after a gestation of between 18 - 21 days. They will then start venturing out of the nest to start exploring at approximately 10 -12 days of age. Once the youngsters are around 8 weeks old they'll be fully weaned and independent!
Once at this stage, they will be moved into a nursery enclosure where they will stay for around 3 - 4 weeks before being housed into same-sex groups in the main enclosures. By separating the males and females we are able to control any indiscriminate breeding.
The adult harvest mice are only around 3-4cm in size so you can imagine how tiny their babies are!

A new litter of Harvest Mice!

Imagine going in to the Harvest Mouse Exhibit to discover an unknown litter of tiny babies that we didn't previously know about ......! That's exactly what happened yesterday when two of the Animal Care Team took on the task of moving the parent Harvest Mice to a new enclosure (to avoid in-breeding). The unexpected arrival of the adorable new babies was celebrated by capturing this image this morning!
We recently spoke with the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Trust regarding the possibility of a release programme - using our 'Harvies' for the project. This would obviously need to be properly assessed by mammal experts and then correctly managed. We're looking forward to receiving further news about our re-introduction suggestion and hope to keep you posted once there's any further news!