Update on 2009 Tree Kittens

In early May 2009, Feline Rescue volunteers rescued 3 kittens from the inside of a rotting tree trunk. The tree was being cut up for disposal by workers using chain saws. The mother cat was seen, but could not be captured that day. She was live-trapped two days later and reunited with her kittens. The mother (Louisa) and 2 of the kittens (Mica and Mysty) had very unusual color and markings, which resembled those of an Egyptian Mau purebreed cat. The third kitten (Parker) was a picture-perfect tuxedo. All of the kittens and the mother have found wonderful, permanent homes. The two kittens who resemble Egyptian Maus were re-named by their new humans and given Egyptian names: Shu (an Egyptian god) and Maat (an Egyptian goddess).

According to their human caregivers, "Shu and Maat have been winning over our friends and the new vet and generally making themselves popular. She's up to 8 pounds and he's 12 or 13." In the photo, that's Maat with her head up. You have to look closely to see Shu curled up with her.

The Tree Family is ready for adoption!

Here is an update on the Tree Family! If you missed the amazing story of their rescue, click here.

Mom and both kittens are scheduled to be spayed and neutered this week, and will be ready for adoption after July 10th. Their names have changed a few times, so let me officially introduce them. The mom f/k/a Miss Fluffy is now "Molly." She is a fluffy medium haired beauty with bright green eyes. Molly was clearly someone's pet before she left to raise her kittens in a tree. She is very friendly to humans and loves attention. She is not a huge fan of being held, but will sit by you and let you pet or brush her for hours on end. As much as she loves humans, she is very wary of other animals. We think she would be best suited to a family with no other pets. Hopefully in time, she will enjoy the company of a feline friend. We think Molly is pretty young herself and is quite playful.

"Willow" (grey and white short hair) has become "Explorer," which is more manly and appropriate to his personality. He is very daring and playful, but also sweet and cuddly. He likes to be held by adults and children. He has not yet been around other animals outside his family. He is very social and does not like to be alone. If he ever accidentally wanders off, he cries until his sister comes to his rescue or we call his name so he can find us again. Because he and his sister are so close, we are requesting they be adopted as a pair.

"Acorn" (dilute calico medium hair) is still the name of the little girl. She is as fluffy and adorable as ever. She is the more independent of the little ones. She can be wary of strangers and young children, but warms up to them quickly if she's distracted by toys. She doesn't like to be held as much as Explorer but can be pet and loved as long as it doesn't interrupt her play time. As a pair, they are constantly hunting each other and play fighting and are virtually inseparable. We estimate their age to be about 14 weeks old.

The Tree Family: Part Four

This is the fourth installment in "The Tree Family" series. Their story is an example of dedication and perseverance, and we hope you enjoy it. For the begining of the story, please read here.

Miss Fluffy glared at us from the chamber inside the tree, but there were no kittens in view. Once again, a quick decision was required. Guided by an old saying (“A cat in the hand is worth an unknown number of kittens in the tree, and we don’t need her out crossing busy streets anymore now that we know where the kittens are”), we scruffed Miss Fluffy out of the tree and took her back to her waiting kennel.

The tree is in the front yard of a house surrounded by apartment buildings. A conservative estimate would be that it can be seen from the windows of 50 families. It’s hard to imagine what they thought of our visits to the tree, every several hours around the clock, for the next several days. We would approach the tree, make a quick grab into the hole, feel around for a minute or so, and then leave empty handed. We were encouraged, however, by the disappearance (in kitten-sized portions) of the food we placed in the chamber, by the skittering sounds we could often hear inside the tree during our unsuccessful attempts, and by one or two more brief kitten-butt sightings.

Most encouraging of all, of course, was that we occasionally laid a hand on the kitten(s), even though we couldn’t catch it/them. The chamber which appeared at first to be simply circular actually had many side cavities, big enough for a kitten to hide in but not reachable from the hole. My forearm accumulated a large number of wounds as I groped in the splintery bowels of the tree. We began to refer to it as Kitty Fortress.

(Even as we visited the tree, we continued to work the porch as well, trapping one more adult cat, another female, with the same markings. This cat, eventually named “TM,” turned out to be the last one coming to the feeding station under the porch.)

"TM" shortly after capture

At 12:30am on Day 25, we heard skittering as I reached in the tree. I grabbed everywhere I could, coming up empty handed, then made a second pass through the space. At the highest point of the sweep, my fingers closed around something soft, and the tree yielded a small, furry bundle of noise with a strong resemblance to all three adults. We stashed Willow in a pillow case and brought him home to the waiting carrier, then took him to join Miss Fluffy. Their reunion was everything we hoped it would be.

Willow

At 9:15am on Day 25, we touched another kitten in the tree. We had been advised that Miss Fluffy’s two active nursing sites “probably” meant two kittens, but this was the first time we could know for sure that there were at least two kittens. We kept trying all day, but Kitten #2 was simply too fast for us. At 11:30pm, we finally got lucky and grabbed a kitten scruff, and out came Acorn, a spunky dilute calico who turned out to be generally more adventurous than her brother. It had been just over 24 days since we first met Miss Fluffy.

Acorn

Acorn & Willow, brother and sister

Epilogue: We continued search-and-grab operations, along with food monitoring, at the tree for several more days to confirm that no more kittens remained. Willow and Acorn were judged to be about six weeks old when captured on Day 25. This would mean that they would have been no more than three weeks old when they survived without their mother for two days and three nights in early April, when light snow was still coming down some days. It’s clear that Miss Fluffy made a good choice when she picked Kitty Fortress to raise her family. Mom and both kittens passed their initial vet checkups with no major issues noted, and they are now in the Feline Rescue foster system. Now that we know that he’s a boy, Willow is trying to decide whether he’d prefer to be called Willy. Tom and Mary have declared their retirement from cat rescue—at least for now—and are happily cleaning litter boxes once again.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to our many Feline Rescue advisers and coaches (including Nancy, Claudia, Vickie, Cathy, and Janet) and cheerleaders (Kate, Deb, Mona, Sue, and others) in this effort; to our newly met neighbors, including Brian, Cody, Connor, and Tim; and to Pouncer, for putting up with all this nonsense and coming and going in the middle of the night. (If we omitted anyone, it’s probably just because we were too sleepy at the time to remember.)

The Tree Family: Part Three

This is the third installment in "The Tree Family" series. We will be running their story over the next few days. Their story is an example of dedication and perseverance, and we hope you enjoy it.

For the begining of the story, please read here.

Our expert looked at our catch for a while, then delivered her opinion: “I don’t think this is the same cat.”

We couldn’t believe it—didn’t believe it—at first. We compared pictures we had taken of Miss Fluffy on Day One to the angry kennel resident in front of us. The markings were the same, but slowly, a few differences emerged to bolster the initial suspicions: A dark spot on the nose that didn’t seem to be just dirt. A broader face and shorter fur. The most telling difference was in demeanor. We couldn’t really get near enough to check out the nursing situation directly, but when this cat climbed the kennel walls, it was easy to see that there were no active nipples. (In fact, the belly view seemed to suggest that this cat didn’t exactly have the right equipment even to be a mother.) Finally, we were forced to accept that we had not captured Miss Fluffy after all. We named him Mr. X (for being a master of impersonation).

Mr. X (Miss Fluffy imposter)

(We can’t disagree with those who found it somewhat amusing that we caught the wrong cat and didn’t even realize it. However, in our defense, it should be noted that nobody expected us to catch a different cat with such similar markings. The pictures look different enough, side by side, but under a porch at midnight, after a week of sleep deprivation, it had been easy enough to believe it was the same cat.)

So, on Day 18, we resumed feeding under the porch. Sure enough, food disappeared that night. The hunt for Miss Fluffy was on again.

At 1:30am on Day 20, Miss Fluffy (really, we promise!) was in the trap, not entirely happy, but still friendly. That was the good news. The complicating news was that she was still nursing from the same two active nipples we’d seen originally. And now, we had a pretty good guess about what the kittens might look like.

We tried again to get Miss Fluffy to lead us to her kittens, but she slipped her harness even more quickly than she had the first time and disappeared into the back yards of our block. This was another low moment, but we resumed feeding under the neighbors’ porch.

On the night of Day 22, we were a little late getting out to the porch with food, and Miss Fluffy was already there. When she saw us, she ran away. We followed from a distance as she headed toward the busiest street in our neighborhood—and, much to our dismay, crossed it. She continued on for another block and then sat down in a front yard, calmly grooming herself as we watched from across the street. After several minutes, she got up and sauntered a few feet to a large, mostly dead tree in the yard. Then she jumped up and disappeared into a hole in the tree, just a few feet off the ground.

It seemed clear from Miss Fluffy’s behavior that she already knew the hole was there and that she’d fit into it, and so we felt we had found another of her hangouts. But we couldn’t think of anything to do without risking scaring her back across the busy street, and so we withdrew for the rest of the night. All the cats we dreamt of were dodging cars.

Day 23 started with meeting some more neighbors: Hi, you’ve never seen us before in your life, but we think there’s a cat and maybe some kittens in this tree in your front yard and would it be OK if we just looked for them for a little bit? It won’t take us long—after all, we’ve only been working on this for more than three weeks so far...

Fortunately, these neighbors were also supportive of our improbable mission, and so we approached the tree. Peering into the hole, we could see a flat-bottomed cavity, about 18 inches in diameter. In an instant, three weeks of worry and lost sleep were swept away by a fleeting glimpse of a furry little kitten bottom disappearing into the unreachable parts of the tree. We had found the kitten den. Since we couldn’t reach the kitten we had seen, we needed some time to plan our next move. As we walked away, however, Miss Fluffy appeared on the scene from somewhere. We approached her, but she hopped into the hole again. After waiting several minutes, we walked confidently to the tree, ready to reach in to collect the nursing kittens and bring the entire story to a happy conclusion. But this, too, was not to be.

......to be continued on 5/29/08.....be sure to come back tomorrow for the conclusion!

The Tree Family: Part Two

This is the second installment in "The Tree Family" series. We will be running their story over the next few days. Their story is an example of dedication and perseverance, and we hope you enjoy it.

By Tom & Mary, Feline Rescue Volunteers

We never intended to become cat rescuers. All we wanted to do was to clean litter boxes at the shelter, and for several months, our plan seemed to be working perfectly. But that all changed the night we came back from work and saw Miss Fluffy in our yard.

At the time, she had her face buried in a can of cat food. Our neighbor explained that the cat was a hungry stray. He had gotten her some food while he tried to determine if she was the one whose owner had posted lost-cat signs about in our neighborhood. (Not the same cat, it turned out, and our neighbor had no plan for taking this cat in himself.) She was downing the food rapidly, and the can would soon be empty. We had to make a decision quickly: Pick up a cat we had no place to keep ourselves, or let her finish her meal and wander off into the night?

OK; so there really was only one option. Soon Miss Fluffy (a “placeholder” name we never meant to become permanent) was safely kenneled. It was the evening of April 8, 2008: Day One.

Miss Fluffy seemed content in her new home. She was very friendly, the kind of rub-against-you-and-purr cat that wins human hearts in an instant. We don’t know all that much about cats, but we can tell when one is happy. She was eating well and taking good care of herself, remarkably clean for a cat apparently living outside.

On Day Four, one of our more experienced colleagues got a good look at Miss Fluffy and delivered some important news: Miss Fluffy was a nursing mother, and we had kept her away from her kittens for about two and a half days at this point.

A decision was made quickly to try to find the kittens with Miss Fluffy’s help. We brought her back to where we’d found her, letting her out on a harness and long leash and hoping that she’d lead us to her family. No such luck. After leading us on a cat’s-eye tour of our neighborhood (around houses, through several bushes, and under a couple of porches), she slipped from her harness and escaped.

We were devastated. Not only had our inexperience deprived kittens of their mother, perhaps dooming them, but now we had lost Miss Fluffy as well. Our Feline Rescue mentors assured us that there was yet a chance the kittens had survived her absence, and that we should try to feed Miss Fluffy where we had last seen her.

Soon we had a regular schedule of putting out food under the porch of a house on our block in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis, close to where we had last seen Miss Fluffy. We hadn’t really met these neighbors, a bunch of college guys, before now, but they were thankfully supportive of our project. By Day Five, it was clear that someone was eating the food we were putting out, and on Day Six, we thought we caught a glimpse of Miss Fluffy from a distance.

On Day 12, it was decided that we should capture Miss Fluffy again to see whether she was still showing signs of nursing. We were glad to try to get her off the street again, though we feared that we’d find she’d had no kittens left to go back to after our earlier separation of her from her family.

Our mentors outfitted us with a live trap, and we placed it under the porch that evening. The food we had been putting out was disappearing so regularly (and so fast) that we figured it was a sure bet we’d nab her on the first night.

Running a cat-trapping operation is not as simple as we had originally pictured. The trap itself is rather big and awkward, and the space under the porch was not very large. Placing the trap was dirty work, and we wanted to minimize attention from others in the neighborhood, not an easy thing to do when you are sprawled out under a porch that faces the street. Once the trap is in place, you really want to monitor it frequently to avoid having the cat stay in the trap too long. Since the food we’d been placing was being eaten only at night, this meant getting up every few hours overnight to check the trap next door. When we did sleep, we dreamt only of cats.

Miss Fluffy did not allow herself to be trapped the night of Day 12. Or Day 13. Or Day 14. Or Day 15. Or Day 16. Nights of interrupted sleep were taking their toll on us. We had no more sightings of Miss Fluffy to even assure us that the food that continued to disappear was being eaten by her.

Finally, close to midnight on Day 17, our flashlight was met by glowing eyes in the trap, and we saw Miss Fluffy’s distinctive black-and-white face for the first time in nearly two weeks. She was angry, hissing at us as we transferred her from the trap to a carrier, and much dirtier than before. Otherwise, she seemed to be in pretty good shape, exerting herself with great strength and even having put on quite a bit of weight.

The next morning, we awoke after six hours of uninterrupted sleep, jubilant at our accomplishment. We had begun to worry that our colleagues had been losing faith in our ability to capture this cat, and we felt relieved, even vindicated. We rushed in to get the verdict on whether Miss Fluffy was still nursing

......to be continued...click here for the next installment.

The Tree Family: Part One

I bet you're wondering why there is a picture of a tree on the Feline Rescue blog.

Yes, we love nature. But that's not the reason.

Yes, we're happy winter is over and buds are popping out all over the landscape. But that's not the reason, either.

It's because out of this hole:

Came these cuties:

And their beautiful mom!

Yep, that's right! Three beautiful cats were rescued from this tree and are now living the good life in a Feline Rescue foster home.
Stay tuned for Part Two--the complete story from their rescuers, T & M--and more updates from their foster home!