Creepy experience with piggies...

I was doing the beg triaining again, and the piggies were being whimsical and very enthusiastic, reaching their little noses right to the top of the cage. They were in their typical areas: Allopoka poking her nose round the water bottles, Mushroom in the middle, and Odd Sock under the hay rack, emerging to grab bits of food that she'd drag off to eat.

Suddenly, someone else came out onto the verandah. The guinea pigs froze and raced into their pipes and bedrooms. I got the other person to go and called the piggies in an encouraging voice for about five minutes, to no avail. Mushroom emerged from the bedroom once, but dashed back in when she saw me watching her. Odd Sock poked her nose slightly out of the pipe, but even my dropping food onto the floor couldn't coax her into the open.

Since with my old piggies, the sign for "food coming" was a whistle, I decided to whistle. I picked up a kind of toneless chord-sound, like one of those bird-whistle things you pick up at markets.

Then the spookiest thing happened... Allopoka burst out of the bedroom and raced straight through the pipe. Mushroom followed. They scuttled around the cage for a while, like they were exploring a new setup for the first time.The piggies started to take food again, sans Odd Sock, who was now hiding in the bedroom. They started on the bits I'd put on the floor of the cage, then moved on to accepting it from my hands. I kept whistling, they kept eating.

But something was different. There was a tension in the air. Instead of just Odd Sock's half-hearted retreats behind the hay rack, each piggie took their food back into the shadows to eat, afraid to linger in the open. They were slower to beg and quicker to startle.

After a few minutes of this, I was in front of the cage, with the pipe on the other side, and Allopoka half-hidden behind the hay rack, Odd Sock and Mushroom having returned to the bedroom. I was running out of ideas for my tuneless tune, so I whistled a sound that I thought would be a pathetic imitation of a cavy chirp.

Apparently... not so. Allopoka freaked. She was so desperate to get into the pipe that she first smashed against the side, like she couldn't get away fast enough. I decided to disappear for a while, so I put the rest of the veggies, on a plate in their cage, and left. At this stage, all three piggies were hidden and silent. They didn't look like coming out any time this century, even for a pile of lettuce.

But about half an hour later, I decided to go back to collect the plate. I expected they'd still be hiding. To my surprise, an outbreak of wheeking greeted my approach as the verandah light popped on. The veggies were gone and the piggies were back to normal.

Odd little incident. Could this behaviour somehow be related to chirping? I'm thinking of creating a new section on the Cavybeat site specifically for unexplainable incidents such as these. People could send in accounts of strange behaviour, chirping surronded by odd circumstances etc. Maybe even possible explanations for these things. I'd guess this would go under "Wheeks and Squeaks", but may possibly have its own section (perhaps I'd also move Cavy Instincts into this and have a sort of Guinea Pig Behaviours section).

Do you think this section should be made? Should it be its own section, in an existing section or part of a new section? Any names ideas? Or have you had a similar strange cavy experience? Comment!!