Reunion!

We were able to reunite the abandoned kittens with their mother!

Last weekend she took one of four kittens but did not come back for the other three. It is possible that she was feeding the three in one spot and the fourth elsewhere, but we could not be sure, so we took the trio in. However, yesterday, we found where she was keeping the fourth, so after some quick consideration, we decided to replace the trio in the "nest" mom had made for the fourth (the nest was in our garden in a shallow hole filled with straw and covered with a wooden box. The garden is fenced, making it difficult for predators to enter).

At first it was not obvious that she had accepted the trio, because she flees when we come near, being a feral cat, so we could not see her actually nursing, or even interacting with them. However, after leaving the trio with the fourth littermate for at least five hours, we checked on them and it was very obvious that mom had been cleaning the trio (humans are not as good at cleaning kitten poop out of kitten fur as mother cats are), and they seemed healthy, hydrated, and had good color. We left them in the nest overnight, and this morning they, again, seemed in fine shape. We will continue to check on them to make sure.

Interestingly, the kitten who stayed with mom is noticeably bigger and fatter than the other three. Hopefully they will catch up with him, now that they're back with mom. Obviously mother's milk is a million times better than kitten formula.

Before we found mom's nest, we had gone to PetSmart to stock up on KMR and found a product that would be purr-fect for comforting orphaned kittens. We'll review that in the next blog entry.