6/1- A Day With Lynne

This winter was unusually rainy, and the rain has continued through the spring. Apparently the rummage sale had to moved to the weekend of the 11th-12th because of the rain predicted for this weekend! That means all those fliers now have the wrong dates... sigh. Well hopefully people will be able to figure it out by themselves.

This morning I was going to go look for kittens and talk to neighbors at Lighthouse Field, but as I was getting ready to go, I got an email from Lynne asking if I would want to come with her to pick up some feral cats from the shelter. I ended up spending the day with Lynne, helping her out as much as possible and observing what she does. We started out with a tour of her house and yard- it’s a pretty incredible place, and almost exactly how I would like to have my house be one day. She has some cats that are her own, all ferals or ex-ferals, and she has a bunch more foster cats, all ferals that live in hutches in her backyard. She even has a mother feral cat with three three-week old kittens! After the tour, we set up a new hutch in preparation for the new cats from the shelter. Compared to the shelter, the cats in the hutches are living in luxury: The bottom of the hutch is covered with blankets and towels, with a extra blankets on one side for them to sleep and hide in, the hutch has one or two doorless cat carriers with blankets inside for hiding and sleeping as well, and then there are the usual things like food, water, and a litterbox. The litterbox is clipped to the side of the hutch, because some feral cats will freak out and knock it over. The water is also conveniently placed at the one spot where the towels and blankets don’t reach, so that if a cat spills, then the water just drips right out of the hutch. Three sides of the hutch are covered by a quilt in order to regulate the temperature and keep the sun off. On top of the quilt is a tarp that is pinned down so that it won’t blow in the wind and scare the cats. If it rains, then the tarp and quilt are pulled over the entire hutch, which keeps the cats warm and dry. My favorite thing about the whole hutch set-up is that the cats are not isolated. There are usually three cats in one hutch, and the three cats are usually placed together on a farm or in a garden. Anyway, Lynne and I went to the shelter and picked up five feral cats. They were put in side-loaders, which are essentially traps without the triggers. We took them back to her house and put three that had been caught from the same street into the newly assembled hutch. The other two went into another hutch that already had one feral cat. After that, we went inside and checked Project Purr’s phone messages, and Lynne responded to some of the calls. Then, a woman stopped by to pick up a trap to borrow, and I watched as Lynne explained how to use a trap. Finally, we took two of the side-loaders back to the shelter since we had borrowed them.