Suitable Housing

Bearing in mind Gliders are arboreal, a tall cage or vivarium is required and these can range from £100 upwards. Gliders (especially the males) will scent mark everything so the cage will need to be scrubbed regularly. You will find they urinate all over the bars and they’ll manage to stick fruit to them too, as well as all over your walls, a reason a lot of keepers buy vivarium’s so they can contain the mess.

Enclosures must be a minimum of 4ft high by 2ft wide by 2ft depth for a pair of gliders, a general rule of thumb is – the bigger the better! The bigger the cage the more likely your gliders are to display natural behaviours such as gliding. The bars should be no more than 15mm apart, any wider than this and babies could easily slip through, as could some adults, the wire should also be coated.

I personally do not like to see a cage stuffed full of toys, this takes up jumping space in the cage. Items you can add that’s suitable are no-pill fleece items such as ropes, bridges and pouches. Aswell as branches and ledges to jump off and on. A wheel should be a min of 12" in size and be designed for sugar gliders.

Live branches are an excellent addition to the cage, the glider can run along them and display natural behaviours such as stripping bark and gouging holes. You could drill some holes along the branch and fill with acacia gum or the odd mealworm or waxworm, this is great enrichment for gliders and I’m sure you’ll be amused by the happy noises they make whilst eating their discovery! Any branches must be cleaned and non-toxic; you should be 100% positive that they have not been treated by fertilizer or insecticide. To clean branches use an animal friendly disinfectant such as F10 and boiling water and then used a wire brush to scrub off the lichen. Branches from Apple trees are readily available and safe to use, even better would be branches from Acacia trees or Eucalyptus trees – you can also use the blooms from these, the gliders will love either destroying them or they may just discover the nectar) which is also an excellent addition to the diet. In the wild they use Eucalyptus leaves to line their nest, so you may wake up one morning to find your lovely leafy branches are now stripped and sticking out of the pouch or nest box.

For a pair of gliders, I would recommend having 2 sleeping quarters available. In the wild they live in tree hollows lined with leaves where they will all snuggle together so it’s nice and soft and warm. I use pouches, mainly because given the choice of a wooden nest box or soft pouch the gliders will choose the pouch. It is important to keep claws short though as they can get stuck in the material, while most of the time the glider will back up and free themselves, Most glider safe wheels have the option to purchase nail trim tracks seperately to help keep nails trimed. occasionally they’ll pull a claw out. It’s important to remove fraying or tatty pouches, gliders have been known to become tangled up and some have had to have limbs amputated, and some have perished.

Another thing to watch out for is flaps in the cage – they are designed so the bedding/waste tray can be easily removed, but for a glider it makes a useful escape route! So wedge or zip tie it shut. Any additional small doors on cages should also be zip tied closed to avoid escapees. The popular ebay cage mini doors must be ziptied down as gliders use these to escape often. 

 

used with permission from Marie at SGS, please note some info may be edited or added to by SWSGUK