Guinea-pigs

December 22nd, 2003

dagboek-gifkikkerkas04.jpgYesterday the first guinea-pigs were allowed to enter the greenhouse, 13 tricolors, they jumped away to all directions. Within an hour some of them had already found their own territories. If another male approached, he was whistled away, if this did not work out, he was driven away. The rockery along the cascade is really a hot spot. It is still a battlefield, who owns the rockery. We thought we had a mixed group of tricolors, but we have much more men than expected. They whistle thoroughly, sometimes your ears start to sing. Men, who we had not heard before, are whistling lustily. Apparently with all this space even the shy men have the urge to seek/conquer their own territory or to protect it. After some observation we counted 11 men, we heard and saw them whistling. Hopefully the 2 others are females. You see they love to scrape around through the leaves, every insect that crosses their paths, is eaten up. You also see many climbs. At the wall we have several baskets with plants, we even saw 2 tricolors in the highest plants whistling, a climb of 2 meters. We have wooden laths along the wall, to which the wire is attached and also some baskets. The horizontal laths became already footpaths for the tricolor, we saw several of them skipping along the laths. Sometimes you see them also climbing straight up at the wall, which is a little hard, so you see some tumbles and then they start cheerfully again. Or they get jammed for a moment, like this one.