Kitten Season!

The weather is getting warmer, and it appears that spring has arrived in full swing down in Maryland. This means the farm projects ramp up since the ground isn't frozen and it isn't painful to stay outside for hours, and it also means that it's baby season for a lot of animals. I don't know the particulars of exactly why, but there are a TON of feral cats in my area. I think it's a combination of lots of space, lots of barns, and a low interest in spaying/neutering (especially when you're considering farmers don't have a lot of money to spend in the first place, let alone on animals they didn't intend to have, and cats do typically have a positive impact as far as pest control in a barn goes).

the hay pile that we found Plover under

This means that kittens are an abundance around here come springtime. My neighbor down the road has a beautiful old bank barn where he keeps Boer goats and miniature donkeys, and his upper level hay storage area is the perfect spot for feral cats to take shelter. He also has a soft spot in his heart for them, so they also

Neighbor's barn (est. to have been built in the 1830s!)

get fed, meaning he's housing somewhere between 10-20 feral cats at any given time. Charles and I went over later that day and found Finch yelling at us from the goat pen, which has a hole in the ceiling above it to the hay loft. We scooped him up and went up to the loft to see if we could find his littermates or a mom, and we also found tiny Plover. Finch seemed pretty active and healthy, but Plover was sick in a bad way. We knew she'd definitely die if we left her, but also that she might not make it even with our intervention, but we had to try. A little more searching found a couple other littermates, but they seemed to be in a little nest, so maybe mom was caring for them, and we left with two.

Finch (left) and Plover (right)

I had a few work meetings I couldn't skip, so Charles ran out to get kitten formula. We also had a horse with an abscess, so I sent my poor husband to Walmart with the following shopping list:

• Diapers (I said "regular size?? is there a regular child size of diapers??")

• Duct tape

• Epsom salts

• Bottles with extra nipples

• Kitten formula

Thank goodness for self checkout and social distancing, because I can only imagine what an outsider must have assumed he was doing. Is he...does he think human babies can have kitten formula? Or is he putting human diapers onto kittens? Why is there duct tape....please someone tell that poor man that diapers don't need to be duct taped onto babies! In all fairness, I do believe buying diapers and duct tape together is a rite of passage for anyone with horses.

I remember being 16 (and I always looked a lot younger than I was) and being sent to CVS with that shopping list. I usually just got a weird look from the cashiers, but a kind older woman had asked me if I needed any help with "the little one" and if I had support as a young mother. As an asshole teenager, I briefly considered saying "oh no, this isn't my first child, I know the duct tape holds the diapers on just fine!" but figured I'd break that poor woman's heart (and maybe also have CPS follow me to the barn), so I tried to explain that it was for horses quickly. There was a long line, and I just said something to the effect of "oh no, don't worry, the diapers are for horses, you have to duct tape them on!" and finished my transaction and left. She seemed more confused than before, and in retrospect, she was probably trying to imagine how a human child sized diaper was duct taped to a horse to catch their poop and WHY anyone would ever do that. For those who don't know, you put it on the horse's foot to keep it dry and protected after you soak it in Epsom salts. You don't want the infection to get anything in it, but you also want to leave the hole open to drain anything remaining out of the wound.

Anyway, back to the kittens. Finch went to our bathtub with a space heater, a pile of blankets, and a stuffed dinosaur to snuggle with. Since Plover was so much smaller and so unhealthy, we put her in a cat crate with a heating mat and a little blanket den. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do enough for Plover, and she passed away later in the evening. Kittens are HARD, for a lot of reasons, but there's a reason that the Fading Kitten Syndrome exists. For those unfamiliar, here's more detail, and an excerpt:

Fading kitten syndrome is a set of symptoms that are associated with a failure to thrive in neonatal kittens. Fading kitten syndrome is not a single disease. It can have many underlying causes, many of which lead to rapidly declining health, or even death, without immediate intervention.

I'm not sure what exactly caused Plover's death, but it was heartbreaking nonetheless. The next morning, Charles and I were worried about the rest of the litter we'd seen. Plover wasn't with them, but she was nearby and definitely abandoned. Were the others also left to their own devices? We went back and got the others, adding Turkey and Pigeon to our bathtub litter.

Pigeon (left) and Turkey (right)

From what we can tell, Finch seems to be from a different litter, but we didn't see any other kittens his age. We estimate that he was about three weeks old when we grabbed him, and Turkey and Pigeon to be about two weeks. They all had their eyes and ears open, but Finch had teeth and could easily walk and run around (well, okay, he was a little unstable) whereas the other two didn't have teeth in yet and were basically crawling potatoes.

We knew we had bottle feeding to do. Theoretically, the older your babies get, the less often that you need to feed them. However, Turkey and Pigeon were quite dehydrated, and our vet suggested we feed every hour (the recommendations we read online suggested every 2-4 hours for their age - an excellent reminder to consult medical professionals for best results, and that even seemingly well put together and researched blogs can contain information that will not work for your situation. Also, on a related note, vaccinate your children.)

Oh my GOD. I have never been so thankful for Charles as I have been the last few weeks (which is really insane considering how incredible of a human he is, so this should tell you that he's basically ascended into superhero/demigod territory now). We split the schedule - I start at the 4 am feeding while he sleeps, and continue feeding (and maybe possibly taking meetings on mute from the bathtub while doing feedings) until he wakes up around 11 am. He takes over until I'm done with work, which thankfully is both flexible and tends to put meetings in the afternoon, then we switch off until about 7 pm, when I go up to the barn and feed the horses/chickens/goats, then go to sleep. He's up until 3 am, and the cycle starts again. I know, theoretically and with some practical experience, that sleep deprivation makes you stupid. Your brain can't rest properly, and you just get dumb. I've never been such a useless blob in my whole life before. I literally forgot my name in a meeting to introduce myself to a team, and was VERY grateful that my boss said it for me. I found my cereal in the fridge. I boiled my pasta water over the pot at least twice a day. Charles and I had to write notes to each other if we had any desire to remember anything. I would walk up to the mailbox, get halfway and think "oh, I already got the mail today" and go back to the house, then realize I've thought that for the last five days but never once did I actually get the mail.

An additional challenge to how tired we were was that the kittens were in our only bathtub, which meant that showering now required a full breakdown of Kitten Jail, cleaning of spilled litter, making sure to turn the camera off, finally showering, then quickly putting it all back together in time for the next feeding. As you can imagine, Charles and I were living a pretty smelly life between building motivation to do all that for a 10 minute shower.

But, this isn't meant to be a negative blog post. It's so so so much work and so exhausting,

but you wouldn't believe how much fun the kittens are. They all very quickly developed their own personalities. Finch is a troublemaker and adventurer; he likes to climb (up my leg in thin leggings, so there's now "Kitten Jeans" outside the bathroom for me to put on to go in), he's very curious, he LOVES attention, and he

does not like the dogs. Pigeon is a sweetheart, always snuggly, nothing phases her, and she's so curious. Turkey is ridiculous and kind of an idiot sometimes, but all in the name of fun, and oh does he LOVE the dogs. All three of them are ready to break out of jail whenever possible. They've been upgraded out of the bathtub to the rest of the bathroom now, and every

time I open the door, at least two of them sprint for the exit. They are just BUCKETS of fun, though admittedly, I do wish they'd put their needle-sharp claws away for just some playtime. They do seem to have begun to realize they don't have to have claws out all the time, but that's a very new revelation and still seems that we're at 90% razors-ready playtime.

If you don't follow me on Instagram, you may not have seen the videos (they usually go in my story), so here's a few entertaining clips.

And what am I going to do with three new kittens? Send them away, actually. We have two cats already, and if I couldn't find perfect homes for these babes, they'd certainly always have a spot here, but it was never our intention to keep them for ourselves. I think a lot of people can't fathom having these adorable babies in your home then sending them off, and I don't want to suggest that it's easy as pie to send them away, but at the end of the day, I am focused on the cats' well-being. Will they be happy as one of five cats in our home? Will our two bonded cats be happy having three new cats to share the attention? Will I be happy at more than doubling my cat food, litter, flea/tick medication, and vet bills? Since I don't have an absolute resounding "yes!" to any of those questions, I don't feel that it would be fair (to all parties, cat and humans) to choose to keep them, knowing that I have wonderful homes for them to go to when they are ready.

They've now met both dogs, and they'll be ready to meet our cats tomorrow after they finish their antibiotics course. Pigeon had an upper respiratory infection that wasn't flushing itself out of her system as she got fed and warmed, so we took her to the vet for meds, and since respiratory infections spread so easily, the other kittens are getting doses just to be safe. So far, Roo has seen a kitten escape attempt and went from surprised to LIVID that I would bring more cats into her home in no seconds flat. When we had our foster kitten last summer, my cats hid from her for two days before she went to her new home. Speaking of, please enjoy the before/after pictures of The Artist Formerly Known As Toad (now Reyla, living the high life in Philadelphia):

The kittens will head to their new homes once they've hit about 8 weeks, which will give us time to fully wean them off the bottle (currently, as of 4/28, Finch is totally weaned, Pigeon is starting to eat wet food and formula-soaked dry food, and Turkey refuses to eat anything except formula via a bottle), get them introduced to our cats to learn some Good Cat Behaviors™, and be confident that the change in environment is something they can handle. It can be a bit of a shock for babies to handle travel and new places when they're very small, and I can't think of a crueler thing to do than ship a baby off to a new home with an excited friend, only to have that kitten fall sick or fail to thrive.

We're starting to hit the really fun stage, where we don't need to bottle feed every hour, and they can interact with our other animals. Follow me on Instagram at @red_bird_farm for more videos and updates, and if anyone has any tips on how to get Turkey to eat solid food, nothing we've tried for Finch or Pigeon has worked yet, so I'm all ears!