Baby Adopts Three Kittens

Well, we haven't been able to get any people to adopt any kittens this summer, but we have been able to watch as Baby, who already had four of her own, apparently adopted three who were in desperate need at the park.  (God is good.)  Here they are, entirely adorable, if just a touch feral:

Squiggles:

We first met Squiggles here

Rosie:

Rosie looks just like Sophie 

and Fuzz:

Fuzz is a cute little fuzzball

These motherless kittens appeared one at a time.  First came Sophie, days later, Squiggles.  Next came Rosie, and the last to appear was Fuzz.  At first they were all three trying to get the adult cats to warm up to them, without much luck.  But over the last two weeks they have made definite inroads, having travelled from being hissed at and batted, to being tolerated, to being accepted, to being played with, and finally to being protected.

The first cat to extend his paw in friendship was our youngest adult cat at the park, Mustafa:

We have known Mustafa, once feral, now our friend, since he was a tiny kitten

Mustafa is very playful and still learning good behavior.  We might even call Mustafa a little rascal in his antics.  Petey and the others are pretty quick to show Mustafa the hand. He will go running off when corrected by them, but he doesn't appear to get his feelings hurt too easily.  And when scolded, he will often dash just out of their reach (to annoy them), and then plunker down and devise a new strategy.

Mustafa seemed to think these new kittens were toys, and ironically that is how Baby started getting involved in their lives.

Baby

When Squiggles first arrived, Mustafa was trying to play with him, but Squiggles was pretty weak and skinny and desperately looking for food and a cat to call Mom.  Mustafa would bat at him like he was a play mouse, and poor Squiggles would squinch his face up and shrink back, and sometimes cry.  But then he slowly began following Mustafa around and trying to nurse off him.  It was the sweetest thing, but a most heartwrenching sight.  Mustafa tolerated Squiggle's attempts to nurse for as long as Mustafa could stand still, which isn't long.  But when Mustafa would try to play again, causing Squiggles to cry and scream, we noticed that it got Baby's attention. It was during Mustafa's one-sided play sessions with Squiggles, that Baby began stalking Mustafa.

Baby on the steps, in stalking mode.  Mustafa is hiding from her on the hill in the grass.  Strike is in front.

When Mustafa began trying to play with Rosie and Fuzz next, tackling them, causing them to roll around like a ball, or end up flat on their backs in terrifed submission, Baby didn't like it, and chased Mustafa to kingdom come and back:

Mustafa on the run from Baby

. 

One time Fuzz became interested in climbing a tree after he watched his friends do it:

Squiggles, Fuzz's friend, went to climb this tree

Fuzz caught the bug

"Me, too."

Soon all three kittens were in the tree.

Here's a Where's Waldo? diagram.  (Baby's kitten watches from the ground.)

When Mustafa wanted to join the 3 kittens in the tree, Baby arrived to police the matter, and chased Mustafa clear away.

Baby chasing Mustafa from the Kitten Tree

Then Mustafa came and hid near me:

Mustafa takes refuge at my feet

But that correction was shortlived, when Rosie sashayed over toward the nearby food plate:

Tiny Rosie, in the bottom right, steps unknowingly into no man's land

Baby watches as Mustafa positions himself near Rosie's final destination

Mustafa left the safety of my feet, and positioned himself near Little Red Riding Hood's path like the Big Bad Wolf

Here the Big Bad Wolf creeps up...

...and tackles Little Red Riding Hood

Don't think Baby wasn't watching:

Baby, alarmed,  "Oh, that is the last straw!"

And she took off after him.

Rosie fled; Mustafa turned on a dime and climbed a tree.

Then Mustafa came down and went and sheepishly hid under the tennis table, but Baby wasn't letting it go:

Baby: "This ain't over yet, Grandma."

Baby confronts the wolf in Grandma's clothing

Several cats at this point tried make themselves invisible:

Mystery hid under the feeding table

Strike watched the whole thing wide eyed from the hill

Elder Petey came to make sure it didn't get out of hand

Satisfied that Mustafa is in good hands, Petey glances out to sea :)

We are glad to see these 3 motherless kittens have protection.  It remains to be seen how close Baby will become to them.

More New Kittens at the Park

Remember this little guy?

An orphan from the park; he's pretty feral

And this little girl?

Another orphan from the park

Here she is again, in case you need more cuteness:

This cutie was super friendly and all alone, so we brought her home with us

Well, last week, another two kittens showed up at the park, apparently motherless:  This one, who looked just like the one above:

She looked just like the one we brought home with us

And this one:

This little black kitten is the same size as the two calico kittens 

We feel pretty certain that at least the two little calico kittens and the black kitten are littermates, but we are not sure about the other mostly white one.  He looks a bit bigger than the other three, but it is still possible he is a littermate.  Really, we can only speculate.

This guy is just a smidge larger than the other three

We have racked our brains trying to think what intact females we haven't seen for some time, and the only one that comes to mind is this one:

Trixie

I saw Trixie for the first time back in April, down on the beach between our house and the apartments.  Then later I saw her a couple of times during very late night visits to the park.  Nik saw her once at the apartments. 

1. The Park  2.  The Apartments  3.  Sammy's  4.  Our House  5.  The Maisonettes  6.  The Fields

But neither of us has seen her in a long time.  Could something have happened to her?

And then there is Angie, Agamemnon's girlfriend.  She used to come to the park in the morning, even after she delivered her kittens, and then she just disappeared:

Angie, an intact female; we haven't seen her in some time

The missing mother could also be a cat we have never even seen before.

Since we know now from obervation how long and how close mothers stay with their kittens, we know it is impossible for young kittens such as these to appear so long without a mother.  Sometimes we see mothers without their baby kittens, (they will come to eat, then leave), but we almost never see baby kittens without their mothers for this long.  (The exception is when a mother cat may be moving her newborns and she happens to drop one due to a fright.  In that case we may see an infant kitten alone in a bad situation.  But in that case they are so young they likely cannot even walk yet, and that is not the case with these four kittens.) 

After trying on every adult cat at the park as "Mom" and being rebuffed or disappointed, these three finally settled on Baby, who was, at least up until last week, a mother still nursing her four much older kittens.

Baby

Baby and 3 of her 4  kittens

Baby was game after some initial doubts about it.  Though we don't know whether Baby has nursed these three orphans, she has taken on the role of their protector, which we will get to in the next post.

Pretty small to be on their own

We are glad they found the feeding station and are staying close to the group

Big Van Playing with Kittens?

I took a siesta this afternoon because it is inhumanely hot here.  So this evening when Nik got home, I was just waking up.

We have this huge awesome German made fan we use downstairs to keep cool.  We don't use air conditioning.  Hardly anybody uses air conditioning in Cyprus because electricity is so expensive.  It's always been expensive, but the costs have doubled in the last year, since the explosion at Evangelos Florakis Naval Base destroyed the nearby Vassilikos Power Station, the main power source on the island (by the way, the nearby fishing village mentioned in this article was us - hello).  Here's the aftermath of that.  Hmmm...

Our awesome fan

When I left the US nearly 7 years ago, I remember thinking electricity was the last great deal left in America - my power bill often being no more that 25-30 USD..  This was after gas went up in the US and it got ridiculously expensive to heat our homes.  Now I don't know.  Maybe electricity has gone up there.  But here it is insane.  You can expect to pay hundreds of Euros to cool your home.  So, no, we don't do that, and neither does anyone else, but perhaps the big chain stores and companies.

We have ac, but we don't use it.

So as I stumbled downstairs to make some coffee, our giant awesome German made fan was on and oscillating away, and it is as loud as all get out, so when Nik and our dog Muji walked in after taking a walk, and Nik started trying to tell me something, I was straining to hear what he was saying.  But it sounded a little bit like, "When Muji and I were walking tonight we saw Big Van over at Sammy's playing with two kittens."

Muji

Pretty sure I heard him wrong I asked, "I'm sorry, you saw Big Van...playing... with what?"

And sure enough he said two kittens.

There are still kittens at Sammy's - 3 we have seen - but we are pretty sure they aren't Tweets', because they are so young.  For the first time, I saw a black and white one over there yesterday that completely freaked out when I walked up on him.  Well, he surprised me, too, and he took off like a little wild man and went running up under Sammy's giant satellite dish,  overgrown with passion flower vine, and got all tangled up in the vine, freaked out some more, finally made his way out, and shot over the wall to the next door neighbor's garden like a tiny canon ball.  Phew!

So Big Van was playing with the kittens at Sammy's.  That is just amazing.  We have never seen him play. It has taken Moonpie all this time to begin playing since his alteration.  Oh, he's been affectionate, crawling into my lap and nibbling at my hands, and he has just begun playing a little dart and dash with me on the way to the feeding table in the morning at the park, but I have yet to see him play with another cat or kittens. 

Moonpie has grown increasingly affectionate since his alteration

So that Big Van was playing with tiny kittens is not only heartwarming, it is very surprising.  He truly is an altered cat!

Big Van wants to play with kittens, who knew?

We are so glad he has made some friends!

Heartbreak - Losing Fortune

Fortune

Nik called me yesterday about 6:30 pm and told me that Fortune died in his hands while he was visiting her at our veterinary clinic.  He went by to visit her yesterday twice, once at lunchtime, and then after work.  As he was holding her on his second visit, she passed away.  Nik was broken up when he called me.  He had really bonded with her.  And I, too, was saddened.  I was looking so forward to him bringing her home last night so we could shower her with love and make it all better.

Nik bonded with Fortune

 We just sat there in silence on the phone.  He said he would bring her home to bury her.

The empty carrier we had prepared for her Sunday night

We buried her last night in the front garden next to Zsa Zsa, Tweets, and Aurora.

Where we buried Fortune

I think if we had found her a little bit earlier, perhaps a day or two, we could have saved her life.  We should have gone back there mid week. 

I wonder how long she was there in the middle of the pavement in front of the doorway, and how many people stepped around her, or over her, as if she were invisible.  She could not see them because she was blind.  She could not move, because she was too weak. 

Fortune where we found her, on the pavement in front of a doorway

Godspeed, Fortune.  We didn't know you very long, but you won our hearts, touched us deeply, and we will always remember you.  We are so sorry you had to suffer not only illness and hunger, but people's indifference.

Thank you, Nik, for being so loving with her.  Thank you to our new friend, Sandra, for taking us to find her.  Thank you to our vets, George and Christina, for giving her so much love yesterday.

Thank you, Fortune. We love you.  God Bless.

Worth a Small Fortune

Last weekend, a week ago, we met a nice English lady at the park who was walking along by the sea  with what we learned later was a friend's dog.  He was a big dog. He looked to be a boxer and mastiff mix.  He was a very polite dog, and though off lead, did not bother the cats we were feeding.  We commented to her how well behaved he was, and then struck up a conversation with her.  We learned she had an apartment across the street and down about a block from the park.  We told her about our work with the cats in the village.  She told us there were many cats behind her apartments that a fisherman's wife was feeding. 

We met our new friend here

She told us about the many cats who lived back there, and kittens who were not healthy, and other sad stories.  She told us she has had four dogs here who were poisoned in the field behind her apartment building.  She told us about a man who puts piles of raw pigmeat laced with poison out under trees for dogs.  She said the cats and the hedgehogs eat it and die, too.  She said she went to the police, and we heard the familiar story we hear all over the island from everyone who has been through this:  They did not do anything.  They make a thousand excuses not to come out and investigate.  (We know this is true, because our dog was poisoned in our neighborhood a little over a year ago. Our dog was 16 years old.)

After that, she took it upon herself  to post laminated signs on the trees back there to warn people of the poison.  We saw those signs three years ago - we just didn't know who put them up.  We stopped walking our dogs back there because of them.  Now we know where they came from, and it was good of her.

The cats she spoke of live across the street from the park and behind the apartment buildings and restaurants there

We have seen cats poisoned, too.  We had to take one to the vet once to try and save her.  She was one of the ferals.   She came to our home and hid up under our car.  We could tell something wasn't right.  We took her to the vet.  That is when we learned it was poison.  She died also.    But our post today is not about poisonings.  One day we will write about that.  It's hard to write about.

Later, mid-week, I saw this nice lady again at the park while I was up top feeding Strike.  She told me about a kitten in back of her apartments whose eye was infected.  So Nik and I had set our minds to go back there this past weekend to meet with her and look for the kitten, and to see what the situation was back there with all of the cats she'd told us the fisherman's wife was feeding.  So we called her on Sunday morning, that was yesterday, and we met her back there around dinner time.  The lady who had been feeding them went abroad, and now no one was feeding them, so she herself had started taking food down to them in the evenings.  She took us about, but we could not find the kitten she told us about.  It was pretty depressing back there.

But we did see what she said appeared to be a littermate of the kitten she spoke of earlier, with a similar coloring and of the same age.  We were so busy getting the trap and food ready just in case we saw the kitten, we forgot our camera.  So all we have are some pictures taken with Nik's phone:

Possibly the littermate of the kitten we were looking for

I wish this picture showed better the context of this kitten's position.  She was lying just in front of a doorway leading up to the back entrance of an apartment bulding several stories high.  Many people must have passed by her as this exit led to their parked cars and the dumpsters.  There were no other kittens her age around, and no mother in sight.  She was the coloring of Arsinoe, tri-colored, so we knew she was a girl.  She was not moving.

She was tri-colored like Arsinoe

Nik went and got a closer look at her and said to me, "I think we better take her."  I love my husband for things like this.  I know I am very lucky.  He got even closer, and when the kitten did not run off, in fact she did not even move, he bent down, scooped her gently up, and placed her in the carrier we brought with us.   I could see both her eyes were closed with infection and producing heavy fluids.   He looked at me and said we had to get her to a vet.  We put down some food we brought, as some older  kittens were gathering now, and as we walked away more started coming from every direction.

It was a depressing, unkempt sight back there - here two more kittens of differing ages ate

As we were leaving, our friend showed us the location of a new mother cat behind a neighboring restaurant that had had her kittens in a metal tub resting atop a brick wall.  We quickly put some soft food down for her and then said thank you to our new friend and good bye.  We took the little kitten home as fast as we could to try to bottle feed it, and as soon as we arrived, Nik called our vets, George and Christina, in Nicosia.  

The little kitten when we got her home

As Nik was on the phone with George,  I went inside and made up a bottle of formula kitten milk, adding just a dab of yogurt, and got some soft blankets for inside the carrier.  George instructed Nik that if the kitten ate to bring her up to them in the morning, and if she didn't, to call him back and they would meet us at their clinic as soon as we could get there. 

Here you can see her eyelids are nearly glued shut from infection

Nik attempted to feed the tiny kitten very slowly.  She was not sucking and he was slowly squirting the milk into her mouth, but the good news is she was swallowing it all on her own.  He asked me for some damp tissues to clean her eyes.  We tried but could not get them clean.  They were caked with dried fluids and still producing more heavy mucous.  It was then, while I was stroking her for the first time, I felt all her tiny little ribs.  She was skin and bones. 

Nik is happy because she is swallowing the food

Meanwhile Sylvia, Amber, and Jazzy were all about with us outside, seeming to take comfort in the family time, and Big Van even passed through for a snack.  This is the first time we have seen Big Van at our house since we released him.

Jazzy was nearby the whole time

While outside feeding the sick kitten, we had our first Big Van sighting at our house, which was good

The little kitten drank half the bottle.  We then got her a hot water bottle and prepared the carrier for her with some soft fleece cushioning and linens under which we placed a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel.  We put a little stuffed animal in with her to simulate the presence of her mother.  When Nik placed her inside she tried to come toward him again - she felt comforted by his presence.

Here she nuzzled up to Nik - she was really responding to him

We gave her a two hour rest.  She slept in the carrier while Nik grabbed two hours of sleep on the sofa next to her and while our cats investigated the goings on.  I took care of the litterboxes and food and water for the rest of the cats.

Nik got a little much needed sleep while Fantasia investigated  - it was a sweet sight

Two hours later Nik woke up like a hero and fed her again.  She drank another quarter of a bottle.

This morning she went into Nicosia with Nik and he dropped her off with George and Christina.  He phoned me later this morning and told me that George and Christina said it didn't look good for her, and not to be too hopeful.  The disease had already taken her eyes, which means she is blind, and her lungs are filled with fluid.  Now I wait to hear back from Nik with any good news.  We are praying for her and if we could ask if you would please do the same we would be so grateful.  Thank you.  Last night I asked Nik what he wanted to name her and he said Fortune.

Fortune

"Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible." Francis Bacon

3 New Cats Added to Our Adoption Page!

We have added three new cats to our adoption page.

Romper:

Funny, lighthearted young Romper

Moonpie:

Moonpie, the sweetest Tomcat you ever met

Agamemnon:

Agamemnon "Aggie" with his expressive face, is a lovable softy

All three have been neutered and are male.  Please go check them out.  Thank you!