This activity brings a little of the woodland indoors while giving your degus somewhere to dig and explore new smells.
Time: 10 minutes
Difficulty: 1/5
Materials
- Diggable bedding, such as hemp or flax
- Hay
- Dried moss
- Natural materials such as bark, dry twigs and small pieces of wood
- A large glass bowl or other spacious glass container
Instructions
Choose a container large enough for a degu to dig in comfortably. In the original project, a cleaned, disused aquarium was used. Add bedding, preferably with enough fibre to provide a loose digging substrate, and mix in some hay.
The original example used natural materials collected in woodland and dried on a radiator. Drying alone does not guarantee that collected material is safe: identify every plant and use only clean materials suitable for degus, collected away from pesticides, pollution and animal waste.
Cut the materials into coarse pieces and mix them into the bedding. This example included dried moss, reed fragments, bark and young twigs bearing fresh buds. Offer the finished digging bowl and watch your degus explore it.
Sources
Octodons.fr (2021). [Enrichissement – 6] Bol de forêt. Original project published on Octodons.fr, 2021-02-05. https://octodons.fr/enrichissement-6-bol-de-foret/