Blah Blah Weather Plus Kittens

 Blah blah BLAH, blah blah.  Our weather song.

Poured yesterday.  Relentlessly.

I was bleary and brain clogged from the party night before.   

Got a kitten call---from that Crabtree colony I trapped back in March and 1st of April.

Oh, big surprise, eh?  The calico had kittens again.  I feigned the empathy because when you don't fix an outside cat, um that's what happens, they have sex. Where there's sex, there are kittens being born, often to teen moms or moms who have had so many litters already their bodies are worn out.  There are no kitty condoms and the tomcats wouldn't use them anyway.  No stake in it for them.  It's the females who will have to feed and defend those kittens while the boys just wander and fight.  

So anyhow, I went on out late afternoon, not knowing exactly what I was going to do, texting people up a storm before I left, trying to find somewhere for them to go, if I took them.  Dead silence in that regard.  Everybody is full right now.

So anyhow, she took me out to the woodpile and there the little pathetics were, coming out crying and booger eyed and darn cute.  Mom nowhere to be seen.

The woman found them because mom left one behind when she moved them out to the woodpile.  That little one cried for hours til the woman heard her and took her inside.  Then yesterday morning, she tried putting her out where she found her again, hoping mom would return but she didn't.   She saw mom out by the woodpile then and took the kitten out there and found the others.

So, we took them back into their house, cleaned them up and fed them, then they spent the next hours in a carrier behind a set live trap out by the woodpile.  We hoped mom would return, and go into the trap to get to them.  No such luck.  Hours upon hours, with rain coming down off and on, in buckets, we waited to no avail.

During the wait, I discovered other kittens.  Two other litters.  One litter of two, although they claimed there are three, seven weeks old or so, would play on the back deck.  Who is their mom?  Well when I finished up last April, and not because I wanted to, knowing there were still two unfixed females (the calico and a young muted torti), the caretaker lady had told me, when I returned the others, by text, just to let those out in the yard, not to knock or come in and that she figured we got most of them.  What about the calico, I said, with no real response.  She'd been pregnant when I first saw her, in March, very pregnant and then wasn't when I'd returned to trap.   Anyhow, I figure the porch kittens are from the muted torti.

Here is one of them.  I saw the gray and white short hair and the buff and white short hair.

The third litter I saw finally when about to leave, at the far back of the property, with an already fixed torti.  The torti got fixed first week of April so she must have just had them, before I caught her and took her to be fixed.

The colony folk said there are three in that litter but I saw only the two.

Fixed torti mom and two of her alleged three kittens.  You can clearly see the right ear tip on her.

This is the torti mom when fixed last April 1st.

I finally left with the four kittens and headed over to Keitha's Kittie Rescue Karen's place, who gave some KMR.  I got more today, since these little monsters are going through it fast.

I left the trap set where under the trailer near the woodpile, hoping the calico mom would go for it, since it still smelled like her kittens.  And she did, not that long after I got home.  The colony caretaker brought her over.  

In the meantime, someone had given me a spay neuter spot for today, last minute.  So I took Cora the Calico up this morning.  She's tiny and run down and I don't want her nursing kittens while crawling in fleas, unvaccinated and heavy in worms.  All that is being taken care of today, at the clinic, thank goodness.   

Cora the Calico.  Mom of Four More.

In the end, I got an offer from a Salem woman to foster them, but she isn't connected to a rescue, so that means no medical support or spay neuter and vaccines through a rescue's connections.   She said she'd sign on to foster them through Salem Friends of Felines but so far, haven't heard back today if she's got that done.  If not, that's ok, Silverton Cat Rescue will take them once they're weaned, which is only a couple weeks away.  They can stay here, in my bathroom with their mom til then, I figure, if nothing else.

Meanwhile, the caregiver left two messages with the local large shelter but as of today, had not received a call back.

Anyhow, something will work out.

This afternoon, the sun is coming out and humidity is heavy in the air.  Uncomfortable.  We may go from pouring rain and 60's weather to another mini heat wave of 90 something this weekend. 

 Very strange indeed.