About a month ago I got a call from a man in Arroyo Grande whom I'd met on a few previous occasions--he's a kind person who feeds the neighborhood ferals and wanted help getting them spay-neutered. I'd trapped five, but missed out on a pregnant female who now, he was reporting, had given birth to her kittens in his backyard. Now this guy is extraordinary and the world could use a few million more like him--he'd already set up a doghouse as a shelter for mom and she was in there with an undetermined number of kittens. He thought they were a few days to a week old.
This was a night back in late March when it was not only very cold but pouring down rain. I mean, a deluge--and it had been raining for a couple of days. Even with the shelter of the doghouse, I couldn't imagine how those kittens could survive and I was heartsick thinking about them.
But this mom did a first-rate job of keeping those little ones warm, dry, and fed, and survive they did! I wanted to begin trapping for them as soon as possible, since the younger the kittens are when they go into foster homes, the more successfully they can be socialized--something that for feral kittens does not always come easily. But before I could even begin, Mom must have sensed something was up and she and the kittens relocated. This time, the homeowner discovered a few days later, they were living underneath his house! At this point the kittens were four to five weeks old and really needed to be with humans if they were going to be socialized. The first night I trapped for them, I put out four kitten traps (basically squirrel traps) just outside the opening under the house where they were living. The next morning I had TWO little ones in the same trap--as sometimes happens with kittens, one had undoubtedly smelled the food and rushed in, following by sibling who didn't want to miss out. So both got trapped!
To update this story, the two kittens spent three nights at my house, where my friend Claudia visited them and they were examined by our wonderful vet tech Anna Stewart. Anna treated them for fleas and also determined they were both little girls. Later that same afternoon, their new foster mom Jamie arrived to take them home with her. By the time she took them, they had stopped spitting and hissing and, while still unsure about all the changes in their short lives, they had taken the first few steps toward being socialized. Eventually they will be spayed and go off to the Adopt-A-Pet to find their Forever Home. Who knows, maybe some lucky person will take both of them!
Here are a few pics of the little girls with Claudia:
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