Furnishing your gerbil cage

[ahtnamas]

May I suggest, from my long experience with gerbils, some good furniture and supplies:

Litter: use the gray-colored recycled paper stuff for rodents. It absorbs liquids, deoderizes, and is fun and fluffy for your gerbils to burrow through, but does not get tangled up in their feet.
Do NOT use cedar chips! They can be toxic. (In fact, I can't think of any animal that should have cedar chips as litter...)
Also: Hay & straw bales for small animals.

Nesting material: White plain tissues (unscented); white plain toilet paper (unscented). They will cheerfully drag it into their nest box and start makeing bedding.
Some gerbils like short pieces of natural yarn, cotton and wool, They tease it apart with their teeth and turn it into a nest pile.

Chew toys: 1) Cardboard tubes from plastic wraps, foil and toilet paper.
2) Gray pressed-paper fast-food drink-holder trays
3) Gray pressed-paper liners from laser-printer-cartridges - # 2 & 3 make lovely gerbil-produced litter and keeps them busy.
4) Plain paper Dixie cups, without any plastic or wax coating. Throw them a few every now and then, they'll happily destroy them.

Tubing & tunnel toys:
Large pieces of bamboo, big enough for the gerbil to fit into.
Those wooden boxes with holes cut in them that you can buy at the pet store.

Shelters: Curved clay roof tiles.
Coconut shells.
Unfinished birchwood birdhouses from the craft store (4-6.00 each).

Jungle Gym: The big fake root aquarium decorations, designed for big tanks, the ones with the little room-space underneath them. They come in 2 or 3 sizes. (I have a huge one they play tag around).

Branches from the yard: boil them in water and let dry before giving them to the gerbil: Oak, maple, cherry woods.
Also Driftwood (cleaned up).

Wheels: The Habitrail Ergonomic wheel. It's solid, and their feet can't catch. It's designed to attach to a wire cage wall, but I took an old cage apart and made a wire inset with one wall, which I put in the tank for the wheel to attach to.

Food dish: Ceramic, clay, hard wood. Best to put it on a platform ABOVE the cage's floor level. If you put it on the floor, they'll just cover it up with litter (so the OTHER animals (in their little instinctive minds) won't find it), and then forget it's there. You can always change out the wood dish if they chew it apart (anyway, chewing wood is good for them), and the ceramic & clay dishes can be washed.

To keep them interested: Move their furniture around periodically - All but their nest box, leave that in the same place - and swap out different hidey-hole things.

[mollldoll]

Nice tips

but i must mention to anyone unaware please DO NOT give cherry tree wood to your gerbils - it is poisonous to the and will cause them harm

[AndreaS15]

Lots of great stuff, but as already mentioned some Cherry wood is not good for critters. I myself would never give driftwood as it may have come in contact with oil or other pollutant's. Wood soaks in bacteria and such and so even if boiled if the pollutant could be deep enough in the wood it may not come out.
Apple tree branches work great, and are easy to find. There is another tree out here... I can't remember the name right now, but I use it for my degus and such.

As for any materials, i do not recommend them as even what we think is a small strand, it can still become entangled in their little toes, causing amputation.

I love the clay roof tiles, we don't use much of that here, but sounds like a fun little house.

[iamsomeone]

Wow i cannot believe that the most obvious item is not on that list! TOLIET ROLL TUBES!

[gerbillover2000]

Small peices of cotton is not acceptable. When taking it apart it can be ingested and cause some pretty bad damage. o.0

but that's a nice list, there's some stuff I hadn't thought about on there before!