Humid Day

 Somehow, I made it out to the colony I was to trap by a little after 5:00 a.m.   But I only caught one cat.  After that, the rest vamoosed!   Gosh darn cats anyhow.

Humidity set in fast today.  Like I thought maybe I'd suddenly left Arizona heat and landed in Louisiana somehow.   We don't get humidity here much.

It's 92 now with humidity.

But that's better than 104.  I guess.   

I moved across the driveway with my drop trap and scored cat paydirt.  At least, so I thought.   I had a load of cats, including a gray mom cat, who showed up with four or five black kittens in tow.  I caught three of those and her.   But later on, when I left the back hatch of my car open, to go transfer a couple cats from the drop trap to live traps, then came back, she was magically gone.   Back door of trap still securely latched.  Front of the trap, which had faced the back of the car, closed.  

Shoot!   Another small tomahawk front trap failure.  Not a failure, a flaw.  There's no drop down latch, to keep the vertical part of the door from being pulled back by the cat, towards the slanted part.   They only have to reach through the slanted part, hook the vertical part and pull it back an inch, for the cat then to be able to nose out.   I'm going to install drop down latches on  the tops of all the smaller tomahawks now cause I'm tired of losing cats this way.  Three in three years.  Maybe I shouldn't complain so much.  I recaught the first two and no doubt I'll recatch her also.   Whine whine!

I couldn't tell if her three kittens are big enough.  Cats must be two pounds at least to be fixed.   I finally shoved my food scale into the end of the traps with kittens, one by one, then got the kittens to sit atop the scale by putting the towel covering the trap only over the end with the scale.  The kittens want to hide from me, so they'd move under the towel atop the scale.   All three are weight grade.

Kitten on the food scale!  2 lbs 2 oz!  

Three are this size.

This isn't the mom gray, but a second gray adult

At least I have one adult female, this torbi

And this orange tabby kitten

And this black older kitten

I've gotten cats fixed from here before.   Back in winter of 2021.   Here's a photo of one of the 2021 cats I took today, along with one I took back in January of 2021, when she was getting fixed.  Her name is Trixie.

Trixie now

Trixie back in 2021

Well anyhow, the 7 or 8 that go tomorrow will be fixed up at the FCCO.  Yeah, what fun, another trip to congested Portland.   In honor of the trip, I washed my windshield.

My truck driver neighbor had a parking lot wreck with his big rig and is in a Portland hospital his roommate tells me.  Broke two ribs and has a punctured lung.  He could be off work awhile.

Broken ribs hurt!  

We could get rain, as leftover of the Hillary storm churning off Baja.  The weather people are in a tizzy over the thought the storm could still be a hurricane when it hits southern Cal.  Oregon could get, if we're lucky, some leftover rain.