a taste of Hawaii

Here is a photo from the first place we stayed, which was our favorite. (It didn't hurt that they upgraded us.) This is a little after 7 AM on our first morning there. I had walked roughly 100 yards across a palm-studded lawn to reach this point from our room's first-floor patio. Later in the day, while snorkeling over by those rocks at the end of the beach, we saw our first two sea turtles of the trip. The word for "turtle" in Hawaiian is "honu."

feral feline update

At least for this last stretch of falling-down-on-the-posting, I have the pretty good excuse of getting ready for my imminent wedding. More on that front in a moment, but first I want to follow up to that last post.

We've only done the one round of trapping so far, with the two traps we borrowed from TLC Adoptions. We got the mother and the black-and-white kitten, who also turned out to be female. Poor kitties were freaked right the hell out, of course, to be picked up and carried along in strange boxes to be stashed in the garage. It was a bit stressful on me, too, keeping them in the traps in the garage overnight for those two nights on either side of the trip to the vet (they were still groggy afterwards, and it wouldn't have been safe for them to let them out yet) -- I hated causing them so much fear, even though we were doing it For Their Own Good.

Of course after I let them out, those two in particular made themselves very scarce for the next many days. Happily, they seem to have forgotten now, a month and a half later, and have resumed thinking of me as the Person Who Puts Food Out. (If Fiance steps outside though, whist! no cats anywhere. They don't associate him with anything else besides the traps.) Mom and kids are always waiting for me outside the sliding door every morning now.

Gray kitten ... I really need to figure out what their names are. Gray kitten is bold enough to even brush past me now and then, dancing around my feet when I have a food bowl in hand. He probably won't do that any more after we trap him, sigh. But my goal is to have at least our core little family -- mama and two kittens -- fixed and living happily in our yard, as long as they choose to.

My digital camera's been broken for the last couple months. When I decide either to fix it or get a new one, maybe I'll put up some pictures of them.

Cat houses. Not that kind.

I have cats in my backyard. Feral cats. I suspect the mom (a tuxedo with white back feet) is herself one of a batch of kittens we discovered in a box in the carport when we were first moving in, a year and a half ago. Sometime around mid-March this year, she had two babies. "Papa cat" has been hanging round quite a bit too, making a cute cozy family group out on the patio of an evening. Papa is a gray tabby with black down his spine and tail. "Uncle cat" is a gray whose tabbiness (stripiness) is less defined; he's around sometimes too, when Papa's feeling tolerant. The bold kitten is another gray tabby, with white back feet like mom and black spine like dad. The timid kitten is another tuxedo, with white whisker patches.

This is actually the third batch of kittens that has lived in our yard. Batch A, from the carport, disappeared for a bit, then began to be seen again, before disappearing around the time the kittens were weaning-age. Batch B, last summer-ish, was based both in the carport (which we don't use, for cars anyway) and in the fern jungle along the south fence. My brother tried to catch/play with them once in a while, and named the (relatively) tamest one Balthasar. Now we have Batch C, population 2.

I'm going to try to catch them tonight. (The kittens, and hopefully the mom, at least.)

I've been doing a bit of reading, and apparently the current best practice re: humanely managing feral cat colonies is Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR). You trap the feral cats without hurting them, take them to get spayed or neutered, and then release them back where you found them. This means that the cats (who, once they have grown up without human contact, are unadoptable) can live out their lives reasonably happily, but without multiplying. A colony, allowing for the occasional wandering new arrival, will over time shrink in numbers.

I poked around the web a bit and finally found a local group called TLC Adoptions that could help me out a bit with information* and a couple of loaner traps. Trying to make sure I'm doing everything right, and not forgetting anything, is stressing me out today not quite as much as being caught is going to stress out the kitties. I just wish I'd been more organized and got round to this sooner, when the kittens could have been young enough to be adopted. But hopefully they will have a reasonably happy -- though childless -- life around our backyard. Perhaps they will discourage any gophers from developing designs on my carrots.

*Some of the information was verrrry interesting: they were not unfamiliar with our neighborhood, indeed a particular house farther down our alley is apparently a sort of cat-multiplication Ground Zero. When kitten batches A and B disappeared around the time they got old enough to be weaned, it was probably because their mom (yet another tuxedo, now dubbed "Grandma"; she's started showing up in the yard again this last week, too) took them "home"... there.

blackbird singing in the dead of night

Actually, it's a mockingbird. It is nine minutes to midnight (yes, I have been puttering with computer funthings, and my sweetie is out of town and not here to gently push me to bed), and our resident Mockingbird of Insanity is chirruping away. I love mockingbirds, and songbirds of all kinds, but I don't understand why this one is singing at night. They don't, normally, do they? This one does.

I'M going to sleep now.

edit 14 Sep 06: I since learned that night singing is a "feature" of mockingbirds well known to many people other than me. I guess I just never happened to be awake to hear one before. Live and learn.