Two kittens, actually.
One day last summer, I looked out the windows into our backyard, and noticed a kitten standing on the low cement wall that separates our patio from our garden.
Seeing cats in the backyard isn't unusual; we have bird feeders and squirrels and catnip and other things that neighborhood cats like to drop by and enjoy, but this was the first time seeing a kitten visitor.
I went outside to take a closer look, worried that the kitten might be on its own. A moment later, its Mom, a pearly gray tabby that I’d seen before, emerged and hissed at me for getting too close to her baby. I backed off and went inside, thinking that would be the end of it.
I have a security camera set up in the backyard specifically to track the comings and goings of various critters, including cats, skunks, possums, raccoons, squirrels, and other rodents. Not long after the daytime kitten visit, the camera picked up Mama Cat showing her kitten around the garden late one night and urging it along with little trills, which female cats make in order to communicate with their children. After that nighttime capture, we didn't see the kitten again, although the mom cat continued her regular visits.
At this point I was under the naive impression that both Mom and kitten were living in a household with humans. But in December, during a rainstorm, I was laying down to sleep one night when I heard repeated meows coming from the backyard.
Eventually, I got dressed, grabbed a flashlight and went outside, only to find a tiny black kitten huddled up on top of one of our fences, desperately calling out for its mom.
D. came out to help and managed to get the kitten down, and we heard its Mom calling to it on the other side of the fence. He tried to put the kitten somewhere where the mom would find it again, and we all went to bed, thinking that would be the end of it.
Mama cat, drinking from a bucket on our patio. That wound on her nose has since healed well.
The next day, though, we could still hear the kitten calling for its mom. It was two houses over from ours, and it seemed clear that Mom was not going to be able to get it back to wherever they were living.
I went door to door to see whose backyard the kitten wound up in. Normally in San Francisco, we're pretty wary of strangers coming to our doors, but when there's a kitten involved, suddenly everyone becomes very friendly and curious and helpful.
The kitten was hiding beneath a deck in a neighbor's yard. It took a while, but with the help of some tinned fish from the neighbor, we lured it out and D. grabbed it and put it in a cat carrier. I called Animal Care and Control since it was a Sunday and the SFSPCA was not open, and ACC took it in. They discovered that the kitten was a boy, and estimated that he was about 9 weeks old.
A couple of days later, he was taken in by a volunteer who fosters kittens. I don't know what happened after that, but I hope and assume that he was adopted by a family that is loving him very much.
By this point, it was becoming clear that both the kitten and his mom were strays, probably living in a corner of somebody's backyard or corner of the garage that nobody checks all that often. I reached out to the SPCA to have them put me in touch with volunteers who help take care of stray cat communities.
One important aspect of this work is called TNR, for trap-neuter-release. The idea is that you trap a stray or feral cat, neuter it to keep it from adding to the feral population, and then release it back into the community. The conventional wisdom is that when you remove a cat from an existing cat colony, another one will move in — and it also may need sterilization, so it's better to return an already established cat back into the same community.
The volunteer helped set me up with a trap and a process of luring the mom cat back to the yard regularly so that we could trap and neuter her. She turned out to be quite easy to lure, putting regular food out day and night and then putting it deeper and deeper into the trap so that she would become comfortable. We trapped her within a week or two.
Bob.
One interesting wrinkle is that she was occasionally bringing another cat that we'd seen before, a large tabby tomcat with a surgically shortened tail that a neighbor of mine decided to name Bob because of his bobtail. Bob was there the night that we got the mom cat in the trap. He came back at least once that night to check on her before she could be picked up the next morning. In retrospect, he’s probably her mate, and the father of the black kitten on the fence and the gray kitten we'd seen the previous summer.
Once the mom cat got neutered and was staying with humans, it became quite clear that she had been domesticated before. She was really friendly with everyone who took care of her. So the original plan to release her back into our neighborhood was abandoned in favor of trying to find her a forever home, and she wound up being adopted by a neighbor of the volunteer who had helped me trap her.
She now lives in their household, and is friends with their golden retriever, though she is clearly the head of the household at this point.
Meanwhile, we tried for weeks to lure Bob around often enough that we could get him in a trap, since he's probably responsible for at least two litters of kittens, but he doesn’t come around often enough to get into the habit of eating kibble in our yard.
More recently, I've spied glimpses of a mature kitten, not quite a year old, with the same coloring as the mom cat. She is probably the gray kitten that I first saw through the window last summer. We've had little luck trapping her, either, especially since one of our friendly neighbor cats who likes to hang out and hunt in the garden got into a massive fight with her and chased her away.
We still see Bob occasionally, but we haven't seen the daughter since that fight. If either begins coming around more often, we’ll try again.
Have you ever had stray or feral cats visit your yard? Did you ever trap/rescue any? Or make friends with them?