How I found two feral cat colonies
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Medford, MA. Like so many things in life, when one door won’t open for you, you just need to try the next one. As I was heading into my second round of knocking on neighbors’ doors I thought that my odds of success were bound to improve. They did. It didn’t take too long before I got permission from two neighbors to set traps for the wild cats that traverse their property.
The yards in question are back to back, not quite adjacent to one another. The fences that separate them seem to function as a sort of cat highway. The wild cats easily climb the fences, slip in and out of multiple yards and raid trash cans to survive. It is quite an operation these cats are running and unless you live within the circumference of their activity, you would be completely oblivious to their presence. I live three streets away from the center of the wild cat population and was completely unaware of them until two weeks ago (after I rescued the wild cat that a group of construction workers caught).
From what I can tell, the wild cats I discovered in Medford lead a pretty good life. And there are a heck of a lot more of them than I imagined. One of the neighbors showed me a yard where she said that a mother and her kittens lived. Overgrown and kind of lonely, there was a forlorn garage that looked like it could be cat heaven.
The next day I went back to leave food and caught a glimpse of the mother.
The Mama kitty doesn’t look too old herself.
It looked like she had five kittens but they were too young to be the kittens I was searching for initially. I had yet to identify any of those. But this was an especially worthwhile discovery because I found them on a Saturday, which meant I had four more days to help my friend Cindy (a volunteer for Charles River Alley Cats) find and catch enough wild cats to fill her quota of 12 free spay/neuters (on Wed, April 22nd) . The free spays represented a cash saving of close to $1000, but only if we managed to use them. The mother cat and her youngsters could conceivably fill six of those slots.
Here the kittens are eating Friskies I left them and eyeing me suspiciously.
Sandy on April 25th 2009