Feral #44

This little lady showed up on trapping night, and had been on our list before, but disappeared for so long that we thought she had left. Turns out, she just didn't like us.

"Cream Muzzle Pink Nose or CMPN"

We spotted CMPN off in the distance on the same night we caught Feral #43, so we had to put her back on our attendance list. She is around 18 months old and has had at least one litter that we know of.

When we set up for the evening, we usually have a pretty good idea of which cats we might catch or hope to catch. However, when an unfixed cat goes into the trap, we take whoever it is because we don't want to miss any opportunities. We were hoping for a couple of different cats this evening, but we are happy with this trap. We definitely consider females to be more valuable targets than males when it comes to population control. She can go ahead and live out her life now without having to deal with those pesky males and kittens.

Bonus: Another successful use of the Blink camera!

Feral #43

We tried a new piece of equipment in this trapping. The unfixed cats come to the yard so infrequently now; it was time to get help from the 21st Century!

"Cross-eyed Small Black Goggles" 

We call this fella "Goggles" because his "Nictitating Membrane" ("Third Eyelid" or "Haw") are always showing. This can be a sign of disease or infection but none of the other cats in the colony have this condition right now. There used to be one like this that we trapped before. 

The 21st Century help we got was from a Blink camera from Amazon.

This allowed us to lower the trap over the fence into the utility easement and then remotely monitor who was going in and out. The system switches to an infrared setting that lets us see in the dark and finally catch this cat. No unfixed cats went into the trap before sunset, and without the ability to see in the dark, we would have never caught this guy. This video is from when we were lifting the trap out of the utility easement with the infrared activated.

Feral #42

This young gentleman is part of a litter that was born last year.  We have been monitoring him and his litter-mates, and he is the first one to get close enough to our property to trap.

"Copper Marbles"

Trapping Copper Marbles was actually a side effect of trying to trap a different cat.  A couple of different cats, actually.  Copper Marbles has been around, but not as consistently as several others that we have had our eye on.  The two we wanted the most were there, but one didn't go in the trap, and the other went in, but seemed to vanish out of thin air as the trap door closed. To our fortune, Copper here popped through the fence and went right in the trap; the night was not a total bust!

Feral #40 & 41

It has been almost a year since our last trapping.

This entire time we've known about a couple of unfixed females, and they have of course had kittens over the last year (sigh), but they have either come over very inconsistently, or not at all and have only been visible from a distance (in other yards).  Finally, over the course of the last month, several of the older kittens from this past year's litters have started attending dinner on a regular basis, and we've jumped at the opportunity.

"Little Girl" 

This little girl recently started showing up for dinner on a daily basis.  She was quick to figure out the trap, and preferred it as a less interruptible eating spot.  After a week or so of the same routine, we knew it was time to make an appointment.  On trap night, we kept to the same feeding routine as normal, and she went right in.  It only took a couple of minutes!

"Fat Face Gray"

 

This guy is officially the smartest male we've come across.  Most toms, when they encounter the trap for the first time, will circle around it for several minutes before leaving because they can't figure out how to get the food on the inside.  Not this dude.  We lowered the trap into our utility easement and he figured it out and went in less than five minutes later.  Thanks for making it easy on us!  This cat is probably father to a large number of the cats born over the last couple of years.  Most of the males are so inconsistent we don't even list them as official colony members, but we've seen this one on and off regularly for at least 2 years now.  He has just never been around on a consistent enough basis for trapping.  We were fishing for more of the mature kittens the other night, like "little girl", but we're not picky.  An unfixed cat went in the trap.  We weren't going to pass that up!

Celebrating 40 Cats!

   

We picked up this bottle of wine at a local liquor store about a year ago, after fixing #39, to celebrate #40, not knowing we'd have to wait so long to drink it.  It's a fund-raiser bottle for the Humane Society we've been working with, and we feel at this point that a shout-out is necessary.  Without their commitment to the welfare of local cats, we would be overrun with ferals, and at this point our neighbors or town may have used alternative methods to solve the problem.  So thank you Wild at Heart for providing low-cost vouchers for feral cat spay/neuter, Humane Society of Boulder Valley for accepting the vouchers and fixing the cats, and Alley Cat Allies for providing information we can pass on to new neighbors.  Cheers!

Predators

We recently found the very cleanly severed front quarter of the feral cat we called Crazy Legs and believe a coyote caught him. Crazy Legs didn't have very good control of his back half and was generally very clumsy.  We assumed it was some sort of neuromuscular condition, and most likely Feline Cerebellar Hypoplasia. This probably made him the easiest target for a coyote. Coyotes do roam in and around town, we have heard them, and they have been sighted down the block. It is easy to forget that even though we live in suburbia, Mother Nature is not very far away, and these feral cats have to interact with her.

There aren't many other local predators in the area that we think would attack a cat.  The local great-horned owls could take a cat, but it is unlikely to leave one in the state we found Crazy. 

We have 36 cats on our list that have disappeared since we started this project (using our attendance tracking technique). This is the first adult cat we have actually found deceased.

RIP Crazy Legs

Feral #39

We have had our share of interesting catches, and this one is no exception. We had to convince this cat that a regular cat-carrier (not a trap) was an upscale place to eat!

"Scruffy Tuxedo" aka "Charlie Chaplin" aka "Fancy Man"

 

This beefy male has been around for some time. We originally thought that he was a long haired cat, but it turns out that he is just very large. A staggering 14 pound feral (around twice as big as most of the cats). We had our suspicions about him fitting into the traps when he first started coming into the yard. The last couple of weeks of watching him figure out how the trap worked proved it. He would get about half way in before his sides hit the walls which caused him to back out. We spent a lot of time thinking of alternative ways to get him, and our success comes in a most surprising way.

We spent our evenings putting food just inside the entrance of the trap and then staying close by. After awhile, he decided that we were not dangerous and would let us get close. We started putting food into a carrier and letting him eat while we sat there with him. We thought about different ways to secure the door after he went in and figured just being friendly would allow us to close the door by hand. Each night, we would move the food further and further into the carrier until he would go all the way in on his own. That's when we made the appointment. On the night of trapping, we thought we'd treat him with the wet food that we have. He wanted none of it. Only after we switched back to the regular crunchy food did he go into the carrier. What a snob! We gently closed the door of the carrier behind him, and now he will probably never trust us again. Lucky for us, we got what we wanted from him (his reproductive organs).  He is also the only cat to walk out of the carrier and away from us in a dignified way at release time; most cats run. 

Feral #38

This is the offspring of our last catch, Tawny Tabby. Constantly enthralled by us, we had a hard time getting this cat interested in the contents of the trap.

"Copper-Eyes Silver Tabby"

We saw this cat as a kitten earlier in the year and we tried to catch her while she could still be socialized. Unfortunately, she wouldn't come out of the utility easement. We tried a new Netting technique to catch her, but she escaped. We thought she was gone forever until she showed up a couple weeks later. Since then, she has stayed in the utility easement and hasn't wanted to come in the yard, but she is still surprisingly interested in us. We peek over the fence and she sits there and stares at us. She stretches up the fence to try and get closer to us. We imagine she thought that we were just some magic floating heads above the fence! To get her used to it, we started lowering the trap into the easement with bait food. This cat stood on top of the trap and tried to use it to get closer to our floating heads. Eventually, Tawny Tabby showed her how to get the good food in the trap. That's when we knew it was time. We made the appointment and caught this little cat.  She reunited with Mom (Tawny Tabby) just after being released, and it made our day.