Chinchilla (not rabbit) advice!?

A friend has a chinchilla visiting his bird feeder. He says it's hand tame, but only going to survive for a short time outside in PA.

We're currently looking for the owner, but, I told him he needs to bring it inside and keep it safe until then. I think he said something about it losing fur.

Does anyone have any advice of chinchilla upkeep and care? Akane? :?:

I will look at webpages too, but I trust the people on here more.

Chinchillas can be put in rabbit cages with very minor modifications and fed rabbit pellets and hay but hold off greens if you don't know what you are doing. It is preferable you lay down a floor wire with a smaller hole or tile and if all wire you still need a resting spot like a single tile. They would prefer a raised spot to sit if possible. You can just set tile or wood on a couple bricks. Keep them dry and until temps go up that is perfectly suitable for a chin. If you start getting near 80F, especially with any sunlight on the cage, then they will need brought in to air conditioning and/or other cooling methods like frozen bottles.

On bird seed and the greens coming up it will likely die of digestive problems and chins cannot get wet. If they get wet the fur starts to grow fungus and fall off. If that has happened a flea comb can be used to comb out the fur and then dust baths in chinchilla dust or fine sand to get down to the skin. Not play sand with the various sizes and not blasting sand. Aside from pet store chinchilla dust most hardware stores have a grey or white "handy sand" or calcium based sand for usually less than $10/50lb. I forget the brand name of the white calcium based sand people use in other parts of the country.

They will happily chew any untreated scrap wood and safe tree branches.

Not the first time I've wished I could hit THANK YOU more than once for one of your posts Akane. I'm going to pass this info along right now.