As I left for work this morning I popped in to the chin room to change a couple of dust baths over and check on all the chins. I noticed that Griselda was soaking down her front – her waters had broken!
I watched her for a little while but had to leave for work – she was only in the early stages of labour and her contractions were widely spaced so despite my wanting to stay and watch her give birth, I had to go and earn money to keep His Furriness Lord Montague in the manner to which he is accustomed. She must have known I was impatient and was expecting her to produce last week when I got the weeks mixed up – maybe she gave me an early present to stop me constantly checking on her and asking her when she was going to have her kits.

I have fidgeted all day at work and I came home to find a tired and somewhat dishevelled looking Gris who was sitting gingerly in her cage. She shifted when I called her name and from out under her body scrambled 3 little chinchilla kits. All of the kits are a decent size for triplets (2x 48g and 1x 56g) which explains why Gris is sitting a bit gingerly!

In complete contrast to the twins born a few weeks ago under such difficult circumstances, these triplets are already settled with their mother and have established who gets which milky bar position. There has been no bickering or squabbling so far and it is lovely to see them contentedly attached to their mother. She, in turn, is being an excellent mother and is quietly attending to each kit. She seems very settled with her new brood which is great since this is her first litter.

Here they are:

The twins are doing very well now – they are piling on the weight and are not looking quite so spindly as they were a week or so ago. Chinchilla kits are so funny when they are first born – they have huge heads, a whippy tail, and long legs. They kind of “grow into” their heads over a period of weeks.
They are little hooligans and now run to the back of the cage to hide when it is time for me to catch them and swap them over. Then they wriggle like crazy – honestly, you’d think they would be grateful for all the effort we humans put in to raising kits when things don’t go smoothly! But oh no, it’s “let me GO!!” *wriggle, wriggle, squirm, squirm* and then they jump all over their poor mothers once they are in with them.
I’ll see if they will sit still long enough for me to take some updated photos during the week – I have loads of photos of spaces where chins were, tails and bottoms, and blurry grey streaks!

One of my females is due – I’ve been impatient all week long and I was convinced she was due on Thursday. Seems there is a wormhole in time and space between the rest of the outside world and my chin room because in there I seem to be a week ahead of the rest of the planet!! She’s not actually due until Friday. Oops!! So that’s two weeks of impatient thumb twiddling before she is due. LOL
Bless her, her sides were rippling like a stormy sea on Thursday so the kits are obviously trying to boot their way out already. She is currently lying on her heat mat looking very fed up. When I did the feed run this evening she just opened one eye and I could almost hear her tutting as she closed it again and went back to sleep.

Well, it’s gone 2 am and I’m still up – not because I particularly want to be, but because I am rotating chinchilla kits every 2 hours and topping them up with formula 3-4 hourly as required. At least I am not having to fully hand rear – yet!

Hand rearing chinchilla kits is time consuming, often frustrating (especially to begin with when the kits are not used to the formula), and physically and emotionally exhausting. In the first 2 weeks kits need to be fed every 1-2hours round the clock – it’s one of those times when Red Bull or strong black coffee comes in really handy. Mind you, that’s not working for me at the moment as I’m off caffeine!

An alternative to using a pippette to feed the formula to the kits is to get them using a bottle. Bottle feeding chinchilla kits means they get to drink when they want and don’t miss out on a feed if you inadvertently sleep through your 2 hourly alarm clock during the night. The process can be successful used with even small kits (as in the case of the teeny 28g kit).

Twin Chinchilla Kits Sharing a bottle.

.~.

Introducing kits to milk formula takes time – as in any form of syringe/pipette feeding, care must be taken so that the chinchilla does not aspirate on the fluid/food and does not develop pneumonia as a result. With tiny kits this basically means putting a tiny drop of milk formula onto their bottom lip and then having an agonising wait while they lick it off. Initially kits will only take 1 or 2 drops of milk and those two drops can take anything up to 1/2 an hour to drink. The milk must be at the right temperature for the kits which means spending time reheating the milk while the kit decides whether it is going to squirm out of your hand, dribble the milk down it’s chin (getting all sticky in the process), fall asleep in your hand (because it’s cozy, feels safe, and warm) or lick the drop off. Once they get the hang of the pipette and start to like the taste of the milk then the process gets a bit easier – they will start to drink more but then one has to be careful not to allow the kit to inhale the milk in its haste to feed.

Having chinchilla kits is wonderful – they are delightful and precocious, full of energy and highly amusing to watch as they ping around like little furry fleas – but when things go wrong it is often frustrating, emotionally draining, and heartbreaking. The chin room is not the same without the little squeaking noises kits make at their mothers/fathers and the gentle “peeping” noises the adult chins make to the kits but anyone who tries to tell you that breeding chinchillas is easy is either high on something or insane! Time to go and rotate the twins and try to “top them up”. Hey-ho, only another 8 weeks until they are weaned!!