Adventures in Cat Wrangling

Last Spring, when the snow melted and everything came back to life, we found ourselves inundated with a herd of squeaky critters, just waiting for feeding time. It was time to bring in the professionals..."Barn Cats". We got two from a kindly cat lady who must have had 20 running around her barn. We were very optimistic about the prospects of witnessing the "Great Mouse Migration".

Good News/Bad News

The Good News is, we haven't seen a live mouse in the barn since the Barn Cats arrived, although one of the cats soon disappeared after arriving. The remaining cat, Stella, has proven to be a natural born killer. In fact, anything smaller than a cat that lives in the vicinity of the barn, does so with an impending sense of doom. And rightly so. We've seen Stella tearing across the yard in hot pursuit of full grown rabbits. That's had an additional benefit of improving our garden survival rate.

The Bad News is, Stella is a female cat. And mother nature taking its hand in things, we soon had "Little Cat", Stella's first born. We were surprised that she only had one kitten, but life went on. Keeping a vigilant watch on the potential mouse population was a big job. Then a few months flew by and Stella had another litter, this time five little carbon copies of "Little Cat". So now we've repaced the scourge of too many mice with too many cats.

It was only a few days after Stella had her kittens in the middle of the hay loft, until she decided to move them. Up in the quiet warmth of the rafters above the hay loft she had carefully hidden them. Except for the occassional head peeking over the beam, we didn't see them for several weeks.

Then one day as we came in for Alpaca feeding time, we were greeted by fuzzy little puff balls scurrying around the hayloft. One...two...three...four...wait, one...two...three...four... I know there were five kittens when we started. Where's five? Listen...what's that? We heard a faint muffled cry somewhere above us. Maybe one of the kittens didn't make it out of their hiding place. So up the mountain of hay bales I climbed looking for five. Listen...there it is again. But I couldn't tell where it was coming from. I reached into rafter space where the kittens had been hiding. Nothing. Then I heard it again, only this time I could tell it was below me. Since I was at the back of the hay bin, next to the wall, the mystery was coming unraveled. "Five" must have slipped between the last bale of hay and the cavity left in the open-framed wall. It hadn't been that long since we had brought in the new load of hay...enough to last til next summer. So somewhere below the five-story mountain of hay...was "five", huddled in the dark with no clue how to get out. So one by one, we de-constructed the mountain of hay bales. And of course they were cross-stacked to hold them in place, so it took moving twice as many to get just one row out. Finally I reached the bottom of the mountain, and there he was, "five" huddling next to the wall, looking very confused.

The next few weeks were filled with scurrying fur balls...one, two, three, four, five, plus Stella and Little Cat. Our "Cat Explosion" although cute for a while was getting out of hand. After a few calls to other fellow Alpaca owners, we still needed to find some new homes for the kittens. The math was going to get out of hand in a hurry.

So yesterday, we put an ad on Craigs List, and before the day was over, we had emails expressing interest in nearly all the kittens. Now comes the "fun" part...catching them. The plan was simple;morning mealtime always resulted in all a veritable feline free-for-all. So we put all the catfood out in a stall where we knew only the older cats could climb out of. But only three of the kittens joined in this time. The other two were playing in the stacks of scrap lumber across the barn. We now can truly appreciate the phrase "herding cats". Every time I would move the lumber, they would run under the tractor. Then we tried shooing them from under the tractor, and they were back under the wood. Meanwhile we decided to catch the two in the stall before they hatched a plan to escape. Even with two people in a ten foot stall, we had a dickens of a time catching them and getting them into the cat carrier. While were concentrating on these, we saw one of the kittens escape into the hay bin. Now we got you! Or so we thought. Up the hay mountain it leaped, and I was hot on its heels...until it slid between the last bale of hay and the wall...again. Luckily this time it was only two layers down, but much more agile. As I uncovered the escapee, it turned tail and crawled even deeper into the pile. Well, this was going nowhere fast, so we gave up and carried on with our morning chores. Eventually this one came out of hiding and was on the floor of the hay bin. Jo quickly snatched it up barehanded...something she now regrets as she tends her cat-scratched knuckles and wrist. Finally, with the others that had wandered into the stall, we finally had captured all five.

So they've been transfered to maximum security in the kitchen. And after the trauma of their capture has subsided, they've settled down and seem to be quite happy. Of the five, two have already found new homes, and we're just waiting for the phone to ring for the rest. Meanwhile Max and Dylan both have a taken a greater interest in them, now that they're within their grasp. "We're going to miss them". Well...yes, yes we will.