helping the strays and abandoned

I picked up a box of Ringers Solution from Costco last night.  I lost count of how many boxes I’ve bought.  It is for our cat Smitters.  He was diagnosed with kidney failure about 3 and a half years ago.  I hydrate him every day now.  Some times twice a day.

He is down to skin and bones, must weigh about 8 pounds.  But he has a voracious appetite.  Kat and I have to feed him about every 2 hours.  We’ve tried ignoring him, like when we are sleeping.  But it doesn’t work.  He won’t stop meowing and burring.  He makes a loud burring sound and won’t quit until he gets what he wants.

The overgrown yard of the Empty House was cleaned up about a week ago and the owner, Rick, has gone back to the East Coast.  Kat continues to keep a feeding station at the Empty House and we go there every night to put out fresh water and wet and dry food.

we are seeing 3 strays these days.  One of them we named Rusty.  He is a long haired, red tabby.  Kat was able to pet him and he is full of mats.  We saw him one day by the Empty House and got him to follow us home where I set up a drop trap on our drive way.

However, he wasn’t interested in food or hanging around and continued his walk around our neighborhood.  One thing we noticed, he marks like crazy, several times in front of each house.

On Friday night we struck up a conversation with a bee keeper in Trader Joes.  Here is what we learned from him:

• bee health is pretty complicated these days.  The parasites and bacteria that attack bees is now global.  He said that back in the early days of bee keeping there was only one bacteria you had to worry about, and it was easy to eradicate it.
• he has to follow the bees to figure out what kind of flowers they are pollinating, then he can dub his honey as clover or orange, etc.  Sometimes it is as easy as using a pair of binoculars.
• almond flowers tend to make bitter honey and there is no market for almond honey.  If any gets in with his regular honey, he has to dump it.
• bears.  They aren’t really after the honey.  They want the larvae. He has eaten the larvae and he says it tastes like honey sweetened pine nuts – good in other words.

on the way to work

last night, Saturday, we visited the owner of the empty house and he gave us an igloo.  We will set it up on our property to provide shelter for a cat or raccoon.   We stood out side talking to him for about an hour.  He told us some of the same stories.  He has this odd recurring theme, how someone with his exact name has done something evil and he is to blame.

For instance Comcast in N.J. threatened him with physical violence and sent their lawyers after him for pirating their cable.  It turned out be someone with his exact name.  He was also wrongly accused of running a pedestrian over in a cross walk.  Again it was someone with his exact name.

The raccoon visited us last night, so we hastily set the trap.  No luck on trapping him though.

Friday night we set a trap for a gimpy raccoon that has been coming to our cat feeder.  He has a bum back leg.  We talked to a raccoon rescue lady in Simi Valley and she told us that if we could trap him and bring him to her, she would have his leg fixed.

She told us to use a hard boiled egg, cut in half for bait.  The first night we should put the trap out, but keep it from closing.  On the second night we should set it to trap him.

I checked the trap around midnight and the egg was still there.

a family visits

on Tuesday, February 9th, we met the owner of the empty house.  He had just gotten out of his car and was standing at the foot of his drive way.  My wife, Kat, said “lets meet him”, so we ran over and introduced ourselves.   We spent the next 3 hours standing in his cold house and talking.

He told us his deceased wife had 35-40 cats.  The neighbors complained about the cat poop in their yards.  He spent $100K cleaning the smell out of his house.

He said it was okay to feed the cats on his property.

He was only in town for 8 days, going back to New Jersey.  He had lots of stories to tell us.

My wife discovered that we can slide a food and water tray under the gate to the backyard of the empty house.  We saw a third cat there, that we had seen before at our feeder.  The owner is still not home.

My wife discovered a house where at least two of the strays in our neighborhood hang out.  The house looks abandoned, because the owner isn’t home most of the time.  The yard is over grown. There is a ledge along the house that provides a safe perch for the cats.  It keeps them off the ground, away from coyotes.

My wife saw two cats there, which occasionally stop by the feeding station we have set up at our house.  One is a tortoise shell and the other is a beautiful, long hair orange male.

We left some food for them and were surprised to discover, that after a few hours, the food was barely touched.  Is someone else in the neighborhood feeding them?