Surprise mouse birth. What do I do?

Question

I have two female mice (i am 100% sure they're both female) and earlyier today while i was out one of them gave birth. I know which ones the mom but they are both taking good care of the babys so cant tell. she wasn't supposed to get pregnate but she chewed a hole through her old cage and may have had some visitors. i have never raised a mouse litter so please if you know a lot about mice, how should i raise them?

Answer 1

I'm sure the mother will work it out herself :) I doubt there is any special baby mice mixtures or anything, so just let nature go on.

Answer 2

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG.

The exact same thing happened to me.

5 days after i got my first two female mice, one of them had 1 baby.

You don't have to worry about giving them special milk powder and all that nonsense. The mother will look after her baby fine without help.

Its best not to interfear with her.

the babies hair should start  growing at 7 days. Their eyes will open at 10 days. At this time, they will start walking around.

BUT, when they reach 5 weeks they are able to have babies of their own. PLEASE make sure you seperate the males from females. Or else you could have up to 15 or more babies.

Dont handle the babies til' they have fur on them.

Good luck! =]

Email me if you have any more questions!

[e-mail]

Answer 3

So true, Garrett. But if people followed your advise, Yahoo! answers would be a lot emptier.

Answer 4

haha in a drug free invironment lol jk you shouldn't have to do anything differnent the mom should take care of them

Answer 5

Depending on how tame and how secure your mother mouse is with you, you should be able to pick up and hold the babies almost right away. I used to do this with my own baby mice and I never had a problem. Instead, it made them incredibly tame and outgoing later on to be handled once or twice a day from birth. I never picked them up while they were nursing though - all my mice had free time out of the cage once or twice a day and I'd handle the babies then while mom was out and playing.

But if your mother mouse has not been handled a great deal by you or is hard to catch, I would definitely wait till the babies were at least a week old before touching them.

  Your mother mouse will take care of the babies until they're weaned, but you may need to decide now what to do with the males - mice can breed at four weeks old. You may want to keep the girls and see if your local pet store will take the males. Just be aware that most mice going to pet stores will probably be sold as snake food. If you can stand it and you can tell which ones are male, you may want to bring the baby mice to the pet store before their eyes are open. They will still be snake food, but at least you won't be so attached to them. I used to do that, but once their eyes were opened, that was it for me - I couldn't give them up after that.

  If you are going to keep the males, they will need to have a separate cage and you need to be prepared for a lot of cage cleaning - male mice do smell a lot. You might be able to keep the boys together in their own cage - I successfully kept one of my males and his four sons together and had no problems, but I have also had two brothers that were fighting by the time they were three weeks old. If you plan on keeping the males and your mice fight, then each male will need his own cage.

Answer 6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mice

Once upon a time there was a place called a Yahoo search engine, and that search engine can be used to look up many magical and different things. i suggest that you save your 5 points and just look it up in the search engine next time!

P.S., Good Luck with your new baby mice!

Answer 7

Try not to worry, most of this really isn't up to you, it's up to momma mouse. And mice are very good at making more mice!

You'll hear that the mom will reject them if you've touched them, and that's about 10% right and about 90% myth and misunderstanding. Mice are pragmatic, they do what they need to in order to survive as a species. The babies are helpless, they can't survive without mom. If mom knows that either the babies won't survive, or that she isn't strong enough to raise and feed them all so SHE won't survive, then she doesn't waste limited resources on keeping them going until the inevitable happens, instead she'll eat them to recycle the nutrients so she's stronger to raise the next litter.

Things that make her decide the babies won't make it include not enough food or water available, something wrong with the babies, something wrong with her (or just depletion if she's had a litter too recently before this one or is sick somehow), or the impression that the nest isn't secure and predators will get them. And sometimes, a mom honestly doesn't know what they are or what to do.

So if you bother the babies and pick them up really early, in the first few days, every now and then the momma mouse will either get confused because they smell funny, or worried because the nest was disturbed. But there's certainly no guarantee anything bad will happen, more often than not it'll be just fine.

Things to do now: Just leave them alone until they're about a week old. Make sure there's plenty of food and water and something in there to hide under--either extra bedding, paper towels for mom to shred, and maybe a small cardboard box that food came in that she can hide the babies in or under. That will make her feel more secure and less stressed.

Once they're 7 or 8 days old, it's almost always safe to handle them. Their fur will be coming in and you'll start to get an idea what color they'll be. The best way to handle them is basically to fool the momma mouse. Take her out, put her in a play area she can't get out of (and you don't have to watch her) and then take the babies out, disturbing the nest as little as possible so that later you can put them back, then put her back and have the cage be as close as possible to how it was when you took her out. It's best for the first week you're doing this if you wait and grab mom when she's already come out of the nest, instead of triggering predator fears by invading her nest while she's in it with the babies.

Just hold the babies in a pile in your hands, an hour every evening while you watch TV or do something else sitting quietly you don't need your hands for. They'll get used to you, to being handled and the smells and sounds of the house, and if they get this experience before their eyes open at about 13 or 14 days old, they'll be much tamer than anything you find at a pet store and make great pets.

Put them back after an hour, that's about as long as a nursing baby mouse can go between meals (and mom will be FULL and ready to feed them!) and as I said, put mom back in after everything is the way she left it, and then put her food and treats in there so she's distracted. She'll probably fuss over the babies some, don't worry about it. She may start splitting them between two nest locations, she's thinking "well, maybe the snakes won't find both sets of babies if I split them up?" Just put the two groups back together if you find them that way, and put any lost babies you find out in the cage back in the nest. Sometimes they just won't let go when mom is tired of nursing them, and get dragged out, lol.

So as I said, at about 2 weeks old their eyes will open, and that's a great time to figure out how many boys versus how many girls you have. Check the mom's belly sometime so you know where the nipples are, then look for them on the babies at that age--only the girls will have them. Once more fur comes in it gets harder to tell, and sometimes the males haven't developed all that obviously yet by 28-30 days old when you need to take them out, so it helps a lot to know how many you have.

Don't clean the cage during the first two weeks--that messes with mom's "security of the nest" thing. At two weeks you can scoop out everything around the nest and replace it with fresh bedding, but leave the nest itself alone for another week just to be on the safe side, more because it's disruptive. And if there's a water bottle leak or something and it's necessary to clean the cage, just take out the nasty parts and replace them with fresh, as long as it isn't the nest itself it should be fine, and after they're a week old it's very rare for a mouse to hurt her babies.

You'll want to separate the males once they're weaned (that's 30 days old--keep a calendar!) because by about 6 weeks old you're likely to get some more litters if you don't, and that's really too young to breed the girls. The females can all be kept together forever, and from 4 weeks to about 8 weeks you can usually keep all the brothers together, but older than that they sometimes start to fight, and then you need to watch them carefully, they can sometimes hurt each other badly or even kill each other. Usually each adult male needs his own cage.

Enjoy the babies! My web site here: http://verminarium.com/_wsn/page4.html shows my most recent litter at 8 days old, 11 days, and 15 days so you'll have a general idea what to expect them to look like, although yours probably weren't bred for shiny or curly fur or these less common colors. They'll all develop at the same rate, though. Good luck!

Answer 8

you really dont have to do anything. the mother will either take care of them or eat them, one or the other. usually she'll take great care of them and nurse them, if you touch the babies within 18-22 days they'll lose their scent and she might not take care of them, so just let her do her thing, its honestly the only thing you can do