Half a Dozen Release

Six are out, 5 of them bounding down into the tunnels, with Daisy going her own way (as per usual) and heading to another building. Next up, six more-- but I needed a break! I'm a bit tired of being some-smoking-guy's entertainment, and my knees are filled with much pain. (Do I have the knees of an 82 year old instead of a 28 year old? Ow!)

Back to the release!

The Dozen's Recovery

First I want point out that while the photos might imply otherwise, all of the pictures of cats in traps were taken with the trap firmly shut. I just put the camera really close to the mesh so that the camera took the picture *through* the bars. The doors were *closed*, as they should pretty much always be when a cat is in a trap.

That said, you can look at the pictures of the kitties in the new Flickr Set, Project-Cat Part 2. (I figure we've moved into a new phase, past the simple observation phase.)

So, where were we? Right, the surgery was done by 10:45, the cats were picked up by the Volunteer around 11:45, and by just after noon, when I got home from a meeting, we were ready to lug all 12 cats up to my balcony. (Did I mention I live on the 3rd floor?) They'll only be there until tomorrow, when I'll release them back to where they came from. That was ... hard work. Especially in the heat. Tomorrow when I release them I have to lug them all downstairs, but I'll do it one at a time, and it'll be *down*.

They were still pretty groggy. Any time that one held up his or her head, s/he'd be bobbing around like, well, one of those bobble head dolls. (But much cuter. Bobble head dolls scare me.)

The Volunteer let me borrow a fan to get some air circulating around (since, while they were in the shade, it still got to 97 degrees today, I think.)

Mainly I let them rest, although mid-afternoon I did take their pictures because I couldn't resist. (And, in their state, neither could they.)

Oh, sexes-- since the only way we'd ever know is from the vet!!-- Four girls, eight boys.

Girls: Little Grey Girl, Crooked-Kitteh, Daphne (previously known as "Calico") and Daisy.

Boys: (everyone else) Gandolf, Bozo, Walsingham (previously known as "Little Orange"), Pastel, Moo-Cow #4, Mr Mistophiles, Cyrano and, heh heh, Bessie.

Um, Bessie's sponsors might want to rethink his name now... Apparently our "pregnant female" is actually a big tom-cat!!! Well, I wasn't the only one fooled-- so were the neighbors who a month back were trying to catch "her" to save "her kittens." Heee.

"Bessie" is the most angry of the feral cats at the moment. (Although, quite frankly, the just caught Mustache-kitty is none too pleased just now either.) When the Volunteer came over this evening to change out messy newspapers (oh thank goodness for his help!!), "Bessie" lashed out fiercely, shifting the whole trap about. The Volunteer, who laughs about his moniker here on the blog, joked that "The Volunteer nearly lost The Hand."

Tonight, just about an hour ago now, I gave them all a little food and water. The orange boys (well, 3 out of four) actually chowed down: Bozo, Gandolf and Walsingham. Walsingham even gave me his best little orphan Oliver Twist look for more. Daphne also ate, which surprised me, since she'd seemed pretty lethargic pretty late into the day. As of last check none of the others showed interest, but I'll check again yet.

They all seem pretty good. Pastel has a nasty gash under his left eye, unfortunately, but it doesn't look infected (I hope.) Crooked-Kitteh's left eye is oozing goop, which explains why he has it half closed a lot. But there's not much we can do-- how would you put ointment in the eye of a feral cat? When I got one of my cats, she had an eye infection and it was hard enough to put ointment in her eyes, y'know? Sigh.

Tomorrow, the Dozen's Release.
And Mustache goes to the Mobile Clinic. Which sounds like a particularly strange children's book, doesn't it?

Got one!

I went out to retrieve a trap while the Volunteer was here so that we could switch a recovering cat from a messy trap to a clean one. I decided to get the one I'd set out the farthest, to save me the trouble of retrieving it later.

Lo and behold, there was a Mustache-Kitty in it! He really does have the *most* perfect mustache and goatee. So it looks like I'll be getting up in the wee hours of the morning again to take this guy to the mobile clinic.

Alas, Pigpen is still my white whale. Er, so to speak. (She's neither white nor a whale, but you know what I mean.) And Moo-Cow #5 is still in the wind. I saw Splotch, as I said, but no luck catching him tonight.

This means, though, that if my counts are right (if there aren't more moo-cows and oranges that I couldn't tell apart), that there are only 4 missing kitties, 2 of whom are regulars, 2 of whom are more transient. All things considered, not bad at all. It does mean that I'll be trying this again later on (next month?) By then I may no longer be so violently ill at the thought of tuna smell!

Night Two

I have definitively spotted Pigpen, Mustache and Splotch (!!!), but none of them seem the least bit interested in the traps. Eight traps are set out, and they're all empty and all have been. (I've also seen Gremlin and Amaranth, but of course we're not trying to catch them.)

Also, I might have heard kittens when I stuck my head in one of the storm drains. When the Volunteer calls, I'll get his opinion on releasing the two females that I have up here on my balcony. (Um, I hope it's clear I mean releasing releasing, not, like, releasing on my balcony. On my balcony is where they are currently not where they'd be when released.)

Some nights the ferals outsmart the humans and their boxes of tuna. And entries like this one show that this particular human isn't all that hard to outsmart, some nights!

Raffle Winners

I am going to be emailing winners (and CCing donors) so that they can get in touch with each other. Remember that I'll be using the email address with which you donated. If that's not your 'usual' email address, you might want to check that one in about an hour or so. (I'm about to start, but there are 35 prizes to be claimed-- more, since some have multiple winners!)

The Mobile Clinic

The AzCATs schedulers try to assign 75 cats to a high volume spay/neuter day because you can never tell with cats-- how many will you be able to catch? The Volunteer and I were the last ones there (because the Volunteer has super-powers and got us permission to be there an hour and a half later than we were supposed to!) and at that point, my 12 included, they had 53 cats. I think they said 4 more by the time I left, so very close to the 'ideal' of 60. Everyone was very nice and very efficient, and very reassuring. And very congratulatory, too, for catching 12 cats and for raising so much money. The scheduler (I never know whether it's okay to use names online, so I guess I won't) said that she'd seen my blog, and even told another woman who'd brought in a cat for spaying about the blog!

There was one vet and 3 techs working. And man were they working. 60 cats, mine were the last and mine were done by a 10:40am. Seriously. They needed another hour before they could be picked up, but they'd only been dropped off at 8:30, and that was with other cats ahead of them. That is fast work. I watched one of the techs anesthetize (is that the word I mean? I am so tired), one of the cats ahead of our crowd, and he was very deft, knew what he was doing, despite the cat being angry, feral and in a trap. That made me feel better about the whole process. (It's always nerve wracking to leave an animal, even if not a family pet, for surgery, y'know?)

The clinic is actually a truck (see picture), that was parked at a private residence for these two days. I think what happens (and I know enough AzCATs people are reading this blog that someone can correct my mistakes for me!) is various organizations can rent it, and hire veterinarians for various spay and neuter days.

Anyway, everything seemed to go fine because I had a call from the Volunteer at 11:45 saying he had the cats and that everyone was okay.

The cats are now up on my balcony, recovering. More on them later. :)

Kitties home safe!

I have 12 groggy moggies on my balcony. All 12 came through their surgeries fine. One of them had already been altered, but hadn't been ear-tipped (he is now. ) Little Grey was not only not pregnant, but is a boy... ::blink:: O-kay.

[EDITED TO ADD: Actually, no, Little Grey Girl is a girl. But not pregnant. I read the sheet wrong.]

I'll give more details later. Now I must needs go get an extension cord so I can have a circulating air over the kitties as they recover. (I wish I had some place air conditioned for them, but alas, no.)

Morning, ugh.

(Didn't go to bed 'til 2am, then didn't sleep well, hence the title.)

Mustache kitty is sitting out in the grass right now taunting me. He's very rarely so out in the open, but of course he'd be so this morning, staring up at me (I was spreading plastic on my balcony for later), as if to say Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah, can't catch me I'm the Gingerbread Man! Except, y'know, a cat. Who will not be eaten.

I so needed more sleep.

Raffle Winners have been chosen (yay random number generator!) and there are ELEVEN Brownie winners (Tamnonlinear baked her fingers off), and everyone will be notified ... later. Not now, as I am now heading over to the mobile clinic to meet people, pay people (thanks to *your* generosity), and see our colony before they get altered. Whee.

So. Tired.

So many cats.

I can't possibly go to bed until I've updated this blog. What a surreal experience.

We (myself, the Volunteer, W (my co-worker), and S (his girlfriend)) started by setting out a bunch of traps just after 6pm. Little Grey Girl and Little Crooked-Kitteh had been watching us and sniffing around, and almost immediately went into traps. It's really awful to see how scared they are, how they bang around in the trap in a desperate attempt to escape. Fortunately, though, as soon as you put a cover on the trap, and set it down somewhere else (they don't like being moved, obviously), they settle down. So LGG and LCK (oddly, the two cats I once thought were one) got put into the Volunteer's van.

Then it was waiting time. We went up to my balcony to watch the traps. Bessie, however, held court over a trap, showing all the other cats how to get food from the side of it instead of going in!! For a while we thought Bessie would be our nemesis, and then I thought the nemesis would be the Calico, but no, the cat who defeated us tonight was Pigpen.

Then we caught 5 cats in quick succession-- first a small orange that I didn't recognize who just "mau"ed at me when I went to put the cover on. Next was Cyrano who didn't seem to know he'd been caught until I approached. Then we found Pastel (one of the oranges) who promptly sprayed his trap (ew.) Then an unknown Moo-Cow (#4 or #5 perhaps, but I couldn't tell.) And at this point we also caught the Mysterious Mr Mestopholis, who was really quite calm about the whole thing.

During all this we had a bunch of people asking us what we were doing. One guy was accusatory, thinking we were going to take his cat (we didn't-- I knew which one it was.) Eventually he calmed down and it became very civil and he was supportive. Turns out he's a maintenance guy here, so I explained that I had permission, and that if people complain about the cats, he should tell me, this is my colony.

Then Downstairs Neighbor Lady came out and demanded to know what was going on and where we were taking the cats etc. I tried to explain, thinking that since she knew me and I had tried to explain before, that it would be okay. In the end, though, it was the Volunteer who came to the rescue, explaining everything. She's worried that management will still kill the cats, which was enough to worry me, and get me all paranoid. But no, not after all this.

One guy asked if we were "trying to catch the herd"? I said yes, but we were bringing them back. He seemed rather irritated that they were being returned.

At one point a kid started shouting at the cats, "Run! Run free! Never come back here, they'll kill you!" which really irritated me, but S pointed out that they were just kids and didn't know any better.

Then, oddly enough, we did catch Bessie-- she's the only one who hissed that I noticed, when peeked at. After ages of circling traps, she finally went in. For a long, long time Calico was just sitting around, sniffing at traps but never going in until the Volunteer just put down a trap and she ambled on in. So that's, what, 9 cats? Hm. It's really hard to tell the cats apart when they're moo-cows or oranges in the traps, and while I wanted to take notes, I didn't (because we caught five in quick succession and I couldn't be sure of who #3 was already, so it go very confusing.)

Gremlin kept an eye on all of these proceedings, but we didn't catch him, which was good, because we definitely agreed by this point that he was already ear-tipped.

We caught Bozo towards the end-ish of the evening. He is a *big* cat. BIG cat. Heavy cat. Very handsome. I think we caught another orange, too. I'll have to check tomorrow when they're recovering, or get confirmation from the Volunteer who actually *did* take note of these things, thank goodness. Anyway, by this point we had caught 11 cats.

I marveled that we hadn't seen either the Dilute Tortie (who is now known as Amaranth, thanks to her wonderful sponsors) or Daisy. And then Daisy wandered out and lay down in the middle of the parking lot. O-kay. She was completely disinterested in the traps full of tuna, eventually lying down directly between two of them as if to say, Ha ha, I have no interest in your traps of tuna. So the Volunteer set up a drop trap. You know those cartoons of traps with a box and a stick and a string? It's basically a sophisticated one of those. And Daisy walked directly into it to gobble down some dry food. We transfered her into a trap with no trouble, too. She was definitely the 12th cat we caught.

Pigpen had been lying in the middle of the green field area for, seriously, an hour or more, just being a kitty loaf. She was taunting us. Taunty-taunt, taunt. While I was peeking at her, two black and whites ran (and I mean ran) across the grass. I assume that they were Mustache and #4, but I couldn't be sure. We did not catch them tonight, and in fact I only managed to even spot one of them later on, once, running like his tail was on fire (which it was not.)

We moved the drop trap, and she never went anywhere near it. No Pigpen for us, tonight.

Amaranth (Dilute Tortie), however, we did manage to trap this evening. She is the most beautiful cat, seriously. Huge beautiful eyes, delightful coloring. And while she was clearly scared, she didn't fight. Which is really good because we had to keep peering at her-- not because she's beautiful, although she is-- but because her ear seemed to have already been tipped. Only it was curvy-tipped so we weren't sure for a while. But in the end we decided that she had been ear-tipped and therefore had already been altered and could be let go. We kept her in the trap for a while in the hopes that she'd eat something (since no food is going to be put out again 'til Tuesday), then let her go. She zoomed away, as one would imagine.

So, we caught 13, let one go. Not a bad night's work. I will say, however, it was far more exhausting than I anticipated. (Ow, my back.) And I seem to have forgotten to eat dinner (oops), and I still have grades to figure out. (Although, total shout-out of thanks to S for showing me how to figure said grades out.)

Tomorrow I get up in the wee hours of the morning to meet the Volunteer at the mobile clinic. Then in the afternoon we'll bring the babies back here to recuperate on my porch.

Only things that currently have me worried:
1: Surgery (always scary)
2: Catching more cats (I hope) tomorrow night, by myself
3: That LGG may have already dropped her kittens, but in that case, where are they, and that means they're without their mama 'til I can let her go tomorrow night (if she's not too woozy.)

Oh, and oversleeping. I'm pretty worried about that, too. So I guess I should stop now.

Sorry no pictures. I tried, but frankly once a cat's in a trap the only thing you want to do is put the cover on it so that the cat can calm down. And before the cat goes in the trap, all you want to do is keep silent and will the cat into the trap.

So, 12 cats in the Volunteer's van drove off tonight. And I cannot wait until they're back here safe and sound.

Preparations!

So, tonight's the night. (Great, now I have the song 'Tonight's the Night' stuck in my head. Oh well, at least it's Gershwin). I woke up to a text message from my dad that said, "Shh! Be vewy vewy quiet, we're huntin'' cats." Hee.

Plans are in place: (AzCATs volunteer will be here around 6pm, some friends are joining me ... at some point.)

Supplies have been bought: (I really, really expected someone (anyone!) to ask why I was buying 10 cans of tuna fish in oil. It's not like they got shuffled up with other groceries-- I only bought catfood (for the indoor kitties), a notebook (for keeping track of anybody we catch tonight), paper plates (for the putting on of tuna), and ten cans of tuna in oil. Turns out that the store I went to, at least, only sells one brand of tuna in oil, even though they have approximately eleventy-hundred other kinds. I also bought a bunch of plastic sheeting (for carpets, protection of, and car seats/trunk, protection of, from scared cats, bladders full) and shop towels (my dad's suggestion. He's a smart cookie) for cleaning of same.

I also spoke with one of the wonderful office people. I asked if she or anyone around knew where the drainage tunnels run (because I know that the cats are often *in* said tunnels.) She didn't, and maintenance can only be called on Sundays for emergencies, but we did the next best thing: we hopped in a golf car (yaaay! Free ride!) and drove around to all of the tunnels and green areas (where the tunnels tend to be.) This was very helpful-- I learned that most of the tunnel openings would not allow a feline to pass through (they're filled with rocks. Um, the tunnels, I mean, not the cats) and now I know where they are. This is good.

I also finally learned what the complaints that the office had heard about the cats were: smell, and noise. Fortunately, both of those issues will be mainly taken care of when we successfully TNR. (Cat fights are mostly mating behavior, and the urine smell was most likely male cats marking their territory.)

I'll at least briefly update tonight yet with how it went (if we caught anyone at all, and who, etc.) with, most likely, a more complete update tomorrow.

Supplies: 10 cans of tuna, tin foil for covering open tuna, paper plates for placing tuna, plastic utensils for dishing tuna, can opener for opening tuna. Shop towels for cleaning messes (tuna and other), plastic sheeting (for prevention of messes, generally non-tuna.) Covers for the traps, and newspapers for inside. There are enough (in this picture) of either of those last because the AzCATs volunteer is bringing more (as well as the traps.)

(Heh, you can also see a bunch of romance novels in the background. That's the "summer reading bundle" prize for the raffle!)