Lesson 7: The Hours Between: Sleep, Warmth and an Older Clock

A hamster is comfortable in a room of roughly 20 to 24 °C, which is 68 to 75 °F. That is a band of only four degrees. When I first read the figure I went to the hallway and looked at the dial on the wall, and then I stood by Clem's cage on the low wooden chest in the corner and tried to guess what the air there felt like to something that weighs less than a cup of tea. I guessed wrong. The hallway was warmer than the corner by almost two degrees.

Four degrees is not much. It is the difference between a cool morning and a pleasant one, the gap between a kettle that has just boiled and one that has stood for a minute. For me it means a cardigan on or off. For a small animal with a fast heart and very little body to keep warm, the same four degrees can decide whether the evening is spent awake and busy or curled tight in the nest.

So I bought a cheap room thermometer and set it on the bookshelf beside the cage, at the height of her nest. I check it the way some people check the weather. This lesson gathers the questions our family asked about Clem's sleep, her waking hours and the warmth around her, at a time when she was nearly two years old and her clock had begun to run in a new way.

First: Why does Clem sleep so much more now?

More sleep is one of the most common signs of age in a hamster. I had read this before I saw it, and still it surprised me. For most of her life Clem had a habit as fixed as a church bell: she came out at dusk, drank, checked her food, ran on her wheel until the house was dark, and then worked through the night in short busy bursts. Now the bursts are shorter. The gaps between them are longer.

Hamsters are most active around dusk, at night and at dawn. Their day is, in a sense, our night turned over, and the quiet hours of the afternoon are their deep sleep. An older hamster keeps that same shape but fills less of it. I think of a candle burning down. The flame is the same flame, and it still lights the same part of the room, but there is less wax left, and it does not burn as long before it gutters and needs to rest.

I wanted a number, so I kept one. For two weeks I wrote down every time I saw her awake between six in the evening and midnight. In her younger days the page would have been crowded. This time I counted an average of three appearances an evening, each lasting a few minutes, with the longest on a Sunday when the house was very still and the radiator on the far wall had been on since lunch.

More sleep, on its own, is not a reason for alarm. It is the shape of the season she has entered. What matters is the pattern around it. Does she still wake? Does she still eat and drink, groom her face, look around? Clem does. She simply does it in smaller pieces, the way an old man reads a newspaper in three sittings instead of one. I know that habit well. I have it myself.

Second: Why does she wake at odd hours?

Some mornings, when I come down at half past six to fill the kettle, Clem is already up. She sits at the front of the cage with her nose working, or she stands on her back legs at the water bottle and drinks for a long time. In her first year I never saw her at that hour. Then again, I never looked. Dawn is one of a hamster's busy times, so perhaps she was always there and only my own habits kept us apart.

Still, her waking has drifted. She rises later in the evening now, often well after the family has finished dinner, and she sometimes wakes for a short spell in the middle of the afternoon, eats a little, and goes back. The clock has not stopped. It has lost its firm hours, the way an old wall clock keeps running but strikes a few minutes late, then a few minutes early, and never quite agrees with the radio.

I asked Dr. Hale about it at a routine check, in the small clinic where the fish tank in the waiting room hums slowly to itself and a single orange fish turns at the end of the glass. The answer was calm. Older hamsters often sleep more and wake at less regular times. The things to bring in, Dr. Hale said, are sudden changes, a hamster who will not wake at all, or one who wakes but will not eat or drink.

That gave me a way to sort what I saw. A drift is a drift. A jump is something else. If Clem moved her waking by an hour over a month, I would note it and carry on. If she stopped coming out for a whole night and day, I would not wait to see what the second night brought, and I would phone the clinic in the morning.

One small thing I learned to do was simply to stop being surprised. When Clem came out at four in the afternoon, I let her be. I did not rush to her, did not call the children, did not take the moment as a sign of anything. I watched from my chair. She drank. She sniffed the corner. She went back. The house went on.

Third: How warm should the room around her be?

Roughly 20 to 24 °C, or 68 to 75 °F, is the comfortable range for a hamster. That is a normal living room for most families, which sounds easy, but a room is not one temperature. It is a map of small weathers. The air near the window is cooler, the air near a radiator is warmer, and the floor is often the coldest place of all, especially in a house with a draught under the door.

Clem's cage was put in the corner by the bookshelf, away from the window, long before any of us thought about age. It was a good choice, mostly for the light. Direct sun can heat a cage quickly, like a car left in a car park, and a hamster has nowhere to go to escape it. Heaters close to the cage are a problem in the same way. So are draughts, which steal warmth quietly, a little at a time, the way a slow leak empties a bicycle tyre.

I measured. That was the only way to know. I put the thermometer at the height of her nest and wrote down the reading at breakfast, at three in the afternoon and at ten at night, for a week. The corner sat between 19 and 22 °C (66 to 72 °F) most days, a little below the range in the early morning. Ravi looked at the numbers and went to the shed, where the jars of screws are lined up on a shelf above his workbench, and came back with a strip of draught seal for the bottom of the living-room door.

It made a difference of about one degree. That sounds tiny. It was enough to lift the morning reading into the comfortable band, and it cost very little. We did not move the cage nearer the radiator, because a cage too close to a heater can swing the other way and become too warm. We wanted steadiness, not heat.

Steadiness is the word I keep coming back to. An older body, as far as I understand it, has less room for change. A young hamster in a cool corner might simply build her nest a little thicker and get on with things. An old one may find that harder. So we try to keep the corner the same from day to day, like a careful cook who keeps the oven at one heat instead of turning it up and down.

I also learned to put my hand flat on the top of the chest, beside the cage, before bed. It is not a measurement. It is a habit, like touching a radiator to see whether the heating has come on. Wood holds the day's warmth or the night's chill for a while, and on two evenings the chest felt cold enough that I went and looked for the draught. Both times the living-room door had been left open to the hall.

Fourth: What does a cold room do to an older hamster?

A chilly room can make a hamster go cold and still. When that happens, it is a reason to warm the room gently and call the vet. I want to say that plainly because it is the most important thing in this lesson, and because I did not know it until I looked it up, and because it is the kind of thing a family can miss on a busy morning.

We had one cold night. The heating failed in the small hours, and by the time I came down the living room felt like a church in early spring. The thermometer said 15 °C (59 °F). My first thought was not for myself or for the radiator. It went straight to the corner. I knelt by the cage and looked into the nest, which is deep enough that I can usually see only a patch of golden fur.

I spoke her name softly. I did not reach in. After a long moment the fur shifted, and a nose came up, then an eye, and she looked at me with an expression I can only describe as annoyed. She was moving, slowly, and she settled again. Even so, I did what the facts told me. I warmed the room gently, closed the door to keep the heat in, and when the clinic opened I phoned Dr. Hale to describe what had happened and ask what to watch for.

I did not try to warm her with my hands, or put anything hot into the cage, or wrap her in a cloth. That would have been me guessing, and guessing is not care. The room was the thing within my reach. The rest was for the vet to judge. Dr. Hale asked a few questions over the phone, with the faint hum of that fish tank behind her voice, and told me which signs would mean bringing her in at once.

She was fine that day. I still think about it. If I had come down an hour later, or if the corner had been colder still, or if she had not lifted her nose, the morning might have gone differently, and I would have wanted to know already what the first step was. Now I do. Warm the room, gently. Call the vet. Those two things, in that order, and nothing clever in between.

Fifth: Should we change the light and noise around her day?

A hamster's daytime is her night. For years our living room ran on human time, with the television in the afternoon, Otto racing toy animals along the hallway floor between rows of pebbles, and the hoover on Saturdays. Clem slept through most of it, or seemed to. As she aged I began to wonder whether "seemed to" was the right phrase.

We made small changes rather than big ones. The television moved its loud programmes to the evening, after Clem was up and moving and the noise mattered less. Otto agreed, after a long talk, to keep the racing to the far end of the hall. Nobody hoovers the corner by the bookshelf while she sleeps; I do that part myself at dusk, when she is stirring anyway, with the hoover's head pointed away from the cage.

Light was the easier one. She has always lived in the shaded corner, so she has her own dim afternoon, but the big ceiling lamp used to come on hard at seven every evening, like a train arriving. Now June switches on the small reading lamp first, the one by the bookshelf, and the big light only later. It gives Clem a softer dusk. I cannot prove it helps her. It helps me, and it costs nothing.

What I noticed most was that the changes were less about any one sound and more about a pattern she could trust. A rhythm is a kind of warmth. When the house moves through the same quiet steps each evening, the lamp, then the kettle, then the plates, an older animal with poor eyes and good ears can, I think, hear the day turning and wake into it without fright.

Questions Around the Table

Otto asked, from under the table where the toy elephant was being parked, “Is Clem dreaming when she twitches?” I said I did not know. Nobody can ask her. I told Otto that small twitches in sleep are common and that what I watch is whether she wakes normally afterwards, which she does, and that a twitch on its own is not something to worry about.

Mira looked up from a sketchbook full of curled hamster shapes and asked, “Should we wake her to make sure she eats?” I said no. Waking her takes away the rest she needs. We check the food bowl and the hoard instead, and the weekly weight, and if she ever seemed not to be eating, we would show the vet rather than shake her awake.

June, with her tea mug leaving another ring on the kitchen table, asked, “Would a blanket over the cage keep her warmer?” I said the room matters more than the cage. A blanket can block air and make a cage stuffy, and it hides her from us. Keeping the corner steady and free of draughts does the job without closing her in.

Otto came back with another question before the plates were cleared: “Does Clem know it is winter?” I said that she probably feels the air more than she knows the month. Her nose and whiskers tell her a great deal, and a cool corner may make her build a thicker nest. That is one more reason we keep the corner steady, so the season outside does not have to reach her.

Ravi asked, “What if the heating fails while we are all away?” It was a fair question. We agreed that whoever leaves the house last looks at the thermometer, and that on very cold days one of us comes home at lunch. It is a small habit. I would rather keep a small habit than learn a hard lesson.

Points to Watch

Keep a thermometer at the height of her nest and read it at the same times each day, so that you know the real temperature of her corner and not only the number on the wall in the hall.

Watch for draughts, direct sun and heaters that come too close to the cage, because each of them can change the air around a small animal faster than she can change her nest.

A chilly room that leaves a hamster cold and still is a reason to warm the room gently and call the vet at once, and not to try to warm her by hand or wait for the afternoon.

A slow drift in sleeping and waking times is part of growing old, but a sudden change, a hamster who will not wake, or one who wakes and does not eat or drink is something to show the vet. If you are concerned, see a vet.

Keep the evenings in the same quiet order, a soft lamp first and loud sounds later, because a steady rhythm seems to help an older hamster wake into the night without fright.