A Colony of Kittens

I met the woman, finally, who has been e-mailing me for a couple of months about a mother cat and kittens she fed where she lived. She has now moved. We met near her former dwelling. She had seen 11 or more kittens last week, huddled together on a mound in part of the trailer park. She and her husband were extremely disturbed at the sight of so many homeless babies.

She told me she thought someone fed them. I said "Who?" She thought it was a disabled man in one of the trailers. I said "Have you talked to him?" She had not and thought he might be unfriendly.

I went and knocked on the patio door. To the right of my feet was a large baking pan, it's bottom sprinkled in cheap dry food. Farther down the porch, towards the yard and a patch of berry vines beyond, an orange kitten peeked out from above a piece of wood, eying me with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. Beyond him, I saw two little black heads pop up and one gray. I thought "Where are the adults?"

I soon learned the sad answer to that question.

A younger man than I expected came to the door. I told him what I do and why I was there. "I'd like to get them all fixed immediately," I said. "How many do you feed?"

He started in, angrily at first, that he didn't want them fixed, he wanted them all gone and so did his father, who feeds them. Then he softened when I said I just couldn't take in every unwanted cat in Albany. He said he and his father love animals, and that they don't want anything bad to happen to the kittens. He said the strays showed up, his father couldn't help but feed them, but now they are reproducing. I said "Let's just get them fixed." He nodded and said, "Let's do."

I asked how many his father fed. He said about 12 kittens. I said "Where are the adults?"

"Dead," he said. Raccoons killed them, he thought. He said he shovelled the latest victim, the second adult female, likely killed defending her kittens from a raccoon, out of the yard, dead, last week.

I stared out in to the little eyes, watching me from the edge of the berry vines. This is an orphan colony, a kitten colony. They won't survive long either. There are dozens of raccoons in the trailer park.

This is because the trailer park is surrounded by miles of farmed fields. The field animals live in the small strips of brush, berry vines and decidious trees that line the edge of the trailer park and seperate it from the fields. Especially during harvest and afterwards, when there is no cover left in the fields, the field animals move into the park, including the coons.

Coons and cats co-exist at times, but coons are surly, and can suddenly turn on a kitten, provoking defensive responses from mother cats, who are no match for a raccoon.

I told the man about how raccoons cannot jump vertically and once the kittens are older, to put a platform feeder situated 3 1/2 to 4 feet off the ground in a location where the raccoons cannot climb across to it or down to it, and either attached as a shelf to the trailer's side or onto an unclimbable pole. This is a simple way to keep raccoons away or not attract them in the first place, if you are feeding a cat outside.

I have to make appointments elsewhere than my usual vet, for fixing this colony, since these are all kittens. There may be one adult female still alive.

I also visited the new Millersburg colony. They asked my vet for help with the cats they feed. My vet asked permission to give me their number and I called them. Turns out, their house is next to the barn where I trapped over a dozen cats last March. Some may be the same cats. But, they do have a tame stray mother with three teen kittens. She had a second litter already, but apparently none of them survived, because she is back to nursing the teens.