Feather Gets a Home

Feather's beginning was humble and doomed, had not the wrecking yard owner come across the little family of four newborn kittens, down in the trash on the floorboard of a wrecked car. The wrecked car was one among dozens and dozens of wrecked trashed cars lined up in long rows awaiting the crusher, in a remote location off Highway 34. Their young mother would leave them, and walk the dirt road a half mile up to Highway 34 and hunt mice in the ditches in the evening hours. It was a hard hungry life for her also.

At one point, she was brought to the business center down the road, as a kitten, by a business owner who himself had an unfixed cat at his place. I knew this because two years before, I trapped cats for someone in that business center who knew about the two sisters the other man brought. But he left them behind when his business failed and he moved on. I don't know what happened to the other sister. By that time, I had all the cats at the other end trapped and fixed.

I saw this cat, however, off and on, when traversing highway 34, just west of the railroad tracks in the ditch or just up from the ditch, looking forlorn. I wanted to believe the seed warehouse people fed her. They didn't.

When I was called by the wrecking yard owner, I wondered if the cat I would see along the road, was their mother. It was hot the day I went out and inside that wrecked car with those four brand new lives living inside, it was even hotter. Too hot. They were open mouth breathing, eyes still closed. I made the decision to remove them. I fed them KMR from a syringe, then put the four in a carrier behind a live trap, hoping to catch their mother. I also set traps along the dirt road, several of them. Then I waited. At almost dark, I caught the muted calico.

She was young and starved and angry. I showed her to the wrecking yard watchman who said that wasn't the mother. Disappointed, I went home with both kittens and the trapped cat. She was spayed the next day. The vet called to say she was actively lactating, too. I was ecstatic.

I had been bottle feeding the newborns every couple of hours and this is no easy task. All four were girls. Mom came home from the vet's and immediately took over care of her kittens. And of eating everything in sight. For ten days, I could not fill that cat up. She was starved and skrawny. But no more. However, she's still feral and still on the angry side. The other day, I left the door of the kitten room open and curious Panda wandered in. Blueberry, one of the wrecking yard kittens walked up to her excitedly and Panda swatted at her.

In the next instant, Mom was off the windowsill and attacking Panda ferociously. How dare Panda swat at her kitten?

Muffles got a home first. She was delightful and specialized in daintily standing on her back legs swatting at toys or just sitting up like that. I called Muffles, "the dancer". Today, Feather left me for a home with an OSU coach.

Can you believe it? I can't. That little girl, born so humbly in the trash like that, in the middle of nowhere, to an abandoned starved young mother, now, she has a home of her own with people who love her! Can you believe it? It's a miracle.
She was born here.
Mom nursing her babies.This is Feather that night after I took them, from that car, and was bottle feeding them.
Feather at two weeks of age.
Blue-eyed Feather now.
Blueberry, the other sister, and Feather.

Mom is upset tonight, that another of her girls is gone. She is very upset. I need to go comfort her.