Disaster Kittens

Usually, fostering for the county shelter means that during kitten season (roughly March - November), the foster coordinator will send out an email to the group possibly multiple times during the day with a list of kittens that need foster homes. If you have space and energy, you respond to the email and that's how you end up with kittens.

In addition to those messages, I also get emails sent just to me when:

1. They have a kitten that is very sick and they want to give it a chance but there's a high likelihood it will not make it, or
2. They have a kitten with injuries/illness that people viscerally react to.

It's usually the former, but every once in a while it's the latter.

Saying my current fosters have eye issues is an understatement of epic proportions. The girls are about four weeks old and they have one good eye between the two of them. The other three eyes are kind of horrifying. Obviously they need surgery to remove them, but that will have to wait until they are big enough to withstand it.

They will be transferred to the SPCA (which is set up to handle such cases) on Thursday, but in the meantime I have given them temporary names. The little one is Titanic (it's aspirational!) and her big sister is Hindenburg.

(This is probably the only picture I'll ever have of them, and even this required some editing with the clone tool to hide Hindenburg's right eye which really shouldn't be visible from this angle but absolutely was.) 

It's Two Traps!

As mentioned before, I borrowed a drop trap to catch the pregnant feral in order to get her spayed and stop the kitten factory in the alley. (The cat my neighbors had trapped Thursday night — born late last year — was spayed on Wednesday, and she had an early pregnancy with five fetuses, so one disaster averted!)

So for a week, I sat out in the alley a few hours around dawn and dusk, waiting for her to show up. Her Wednesday appointment came and went without me seeing her at all. The shelter said I could bring her in Friday if I could catch her.

And I sat and waited. And sat and waited.

(I did get an inexpensive Adirondack-style chair which has a cup/phone/glasses holders and is pretty comfortable, so at least there's that. I've been getting a lot of writing done while sitting there.)

Thursday morning, I was on the phone with a friend, not even paying attention to the trap when I happened to glance over and there was something inside. (I wasn't wearing my glasses. Everything was fuzzy.)

Lo and behold...

Except... she wasn't pregnant. I thought I'd caught a different cat, but then I realized she was lactating. So right cat, wrong time to catch her. Since I had no idea where her kittens were, I had to let her go again.

Sigh.

Later that morning, I was kicking myself for not knocking on a few doors to see if I could find her kittens while I had her in the trap. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Anyhow, I'll wait a month and then work on trapping the entire family. The kittens will get socialized and adopted out and mom will get spayed.

Foster Updates

No changes in the house. Gnocchi is regrowing hair, Lulu is doing great, and Nimbus still can't decide whether to hiss or purr.