A tale of 5 Uh 6 kittens!

 Morning all.  Before I begin my tale, I wanted to just show you what joined me yesterday evening.

"What do you want to do.  I don't know.  What do you want to do?".  Comment if you know where that line comes from.  That's a vulture sitting on our deck.  He's been hanging around here for a few weeks now.  I think all the new construction took away his house.  He's decided we're the hip place to be.  

So now onto my saga.  We have a colony of feral cats that live in our back yard.  They've been here for years.  We've tried everything we can to trap them, lure them, etc. to get them fixed, but success has been hit or miss.  The colony was down to three females.  There's a grey male that keeps coming around, but he doesn't live here.  He just knows it's easy picking.  I think he belongs to someone, but they haven't fixed him.  So we deal.  Nature seems to keep the colony small.  I don't say that to sound cruel.  My dream is that they would trust me so that I can get them fixed as well as the kittens and them live happily ever after.  That isn't the case, and the places the mother cats choose is less than stellar.  Case in point.  A few days ago I noticed kitten cries coming from what I thought was the new duct work under our house.  Not cool ( pun intended).  They would cry and then it would stop.  Then it picked up again under our house over by the front door.  Good news, they weren't in the duct work.  Bad news is I can't get to them.  The crying continued for 3 days.  At first I thought the mother was coming in to them, but soon realized she was absent.  I called a friend of mine who lives close by and he, bless his heart, crawled under the house and retrieved 5 kittens aged 2- 3 weeks.  The eyes were opened, but they weren't walking very well.  I left them outside for 2 hours until dark to see if mom would show.  She didn't, so I brought them in.  They stayed with me while I looked for a rescue that could take them.  I found a wonderful rescue called Whiskers on Wahoo; a non profit rescue.  Please follow them on facebook.  She's full to the gills, but knew this was an urgent situation.  We met at a halfway mark between our homes yesterday afternoon.  WHEW!  Crisis averted! 

During the evening I kept hearing what sounded like a faint cry.  Not enough to be for sure.  Then last night around 10 PM( because it couldn't be at a decent hour) I heard a stronger cry and knew one was left behind!  I have to say I'm very proud of myself.  I had no choice but to get into the crawl space myself.  Crawled all the way across to the other side of the house and found this little one crying and alone.  I grabbed it and brought it into the house.  I contacted the rescue and we met again around 11:30 at night to reunite this little one with it's siblings.  I was 12:15 am getting home and into bed.  Woke up at 6:30.  Needless to say, under my house is now sealed off to any wanna be mama cats that think that's just a dandy place!

I thought I'd include a few shots of "The North 40" garden.  This is the garden to the side of my driveway.  The last picture is of the bean trellis my dad built years ago.  Some of the joints broke and had to be replaced.  I tried to keep as much of his work as possible.  Very happy with the result.  It's not in the North 40.  It's in the South 40 which is the garden in the backyard.