Moving the Kitten Kolony

Boy, it got quiet in here. I went from blogging two, three times a day, replete with kitty pix, to nothing. The sad fact of the matter is that, as of Monday night, the kittens have gone “home” – they’ve returned to my sister-in-law’s place, where they have taken over a two-car garage (no joke!) as a training ground for stalking and pouncing and other kittenish activities. It was fun watching them get their first glimpse of a crawling insect – at first they jumped back, and then they started to pursue. And then they ALL started to pursue… one little beetle-esque thingie. Man, I wouldn’t want to be that bug.

The bathroom was fine for tiny newborn kitties, but for the rambunctious bunch this particular crowd of eight was becoming, it was way too small – almost to the point of not being a humane way to contain them, and I wasn’t going to have that. Keeping them in their “home base” of the bathtub was an impossibility for Taxi. I will allow the kittens themselves to illustrate this problem:

Step 1: kittens stream into the cardboard box, which might as well be a spiral staircase, because…

Step 2: they scale the sides of the box with their claws and simply climb out onto…

Step 3: the rim of the tub, from which they can jump down. AND CONQUER THE WORLD.

That little bathroom wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Anytime the door was opened, you were probably going to have to intercept at least four or five inquisitive kids who blasted out between and around your legs like they’d been fired out of the kitten cannon.

Taxi and her babies are now back home, and I miss them a lot – Taxi herself was here for nearly two months, and the kittens were a month old. They were family (despite Olivia hissing at all of them constantly, which got her more than a few go-to-hell looks from Taxi).

The good news? Two of them will be coming back soon. I’ll give them about three or four weeks to go through “kitten academy” (where mom teaches them how to hunt and pounce…and, occasionally, run like hell) and then I’ll be bringing back the mostly-white one (who, upon closer examination, is a little girl kitty who will probably end up with the same markings and coloration as Taxi, who’s quite a pretty cat), and the big, dark-grey-with-no-stripes one, who is a boy with enormous feet. Given the white kitten’s propensity for being the first one to escape from wherever Taxi is trying to keep the babies, I’ve nicknamed her “Miss Adventure”, while the dark grey kitten’s nickname is “Bigfoot” (he has freakishly huge feet and is just a little bit klutzy; he’ll grow into his big stompers soon enough and probably be a decent-sized cat like Obi). I’ll be trying to figure out their “real” names by the time they come home.

You’ve probably been wondering what happened the last stray kitten I made a great fanfare about adopting…

…and there’s a bit of a sad story there. Basically, while Taxi and her brood are camping out in the garage, the litter of kittens that Nimitz was adopted into – temporarily, we hoped, until he was weaned and I could pick him up – was camped out in a less secure location. My sister-in-law’s place is on a mountain – literally – and so there’s a constant attrition rate with cats who get caught out in the open due to hungry hawks and the like. In short, Nimitz and almost the rest of his entire litter – and Lily, the mother cat who allowed him to nurse – fell victim to airborne predators. I never saw him again after taking him up there. This disturbed me greatly, that we had taken part in rescuing this kitten and nursing him back to health and that he’d then been helplessly picked off by a random predator that would never have gotten him, except that I had taken him to the farm. Supposedly this won’t be happening to Taxi and her kittens.

Which is good, because I look forward to years of fun with Bigfoot and Miss Adventure. Look out, Oberon and Olivia…the kids are coming back! Well, some of them. 😀