Back Yard Kittens Come Indoors

     Yesterday morning, about halfway through a series of thunderstorms with heavy rain, Tamara Keel and I rescued four soaking-wet, shivering, crying kittens from a puddle in the back yard. The mother cat was soaking wet, too, but she is a very wary feral that various people in the neighborhood have been trying to catch for years. She may have relocated a fifth kitten before I realized their nest area was flooding and went in after them. She would not have gotten the rest out (and dried off) in time.

      We have been watching these kittens (very carefully, I'd only visited their hiding place three times) for a week and a half. Our neighbor was looking to foster them when they were a month old.

     A huge, old, vine-covered tree across the alley fell in the storm (away from us), crushed a freestanding garage, and pulled the electrical service drop to that neighbor's house almost down.  Our lights blinked.  Tam and I had gone out to the garage to look at the tree from under a roof when I heard really scared-sounding mewing, looked at the gate the kitten nest was on the other side of, and realized there was a big puddle of rainwater under the gate.

      The kitten nest was in a shallow dip and I knew it had to be flooded.  We needed to get the kittens ahead of schedule.  They wouldn't have made it in the heavy rain and standing water.  When I got around to the other side of the gate, a couple of kittens had crawled up into a bush and the other two were in water and weeds, a little higher than the flooded nest.  They were soaked, shivering and crying. I put the kittens in an old sweater in a cat carrier (both from the garage), then carried it to the basement. I put a plastic washtub on top of the dryer, and threw some small old blankets and a couple of T-shirts in the dryer to heat up. With a clean towel in the washtub, I wrapped up the kittens in double-thick paper toweling one at a time and set them together in the washtub. As soon as I had all four done, I started over and by the time that was done they were pretty dry. A dryer-warmed towel and another unwrap and re-wrap with fresh paper toweling stopped them shivering, especially after I put a warmed T-shirt over the top of the tub. Tam was a huge help with logistics for all of that, fetching whatever was needed while I wrangled kittens.

      The dryer top gets fairly warm and I changed out their covers for new ones from the dryer when earlier ones cooled. The kittens huddled up and relaxed. Their eyes are open and their ears are unfolded. They are wobbling around on their feet a little. They may be as much as three weeks old.

      Meanwhile, our neighbor was setting up a largish cage with a heating pad in half of it in her home office and getting KMR (kitten formula) ready. She had some work to finish up, so I kept the kittens warm in their tub on the drier for another 15 - 20 minutes. As soon as she was ready, she called me and I covered the tub of kittens with a newly-warmed cloth and carried them over to her house. They settled in pretty quickly. We draped one of the blankets over the top and two sides of the cage, so they won't be in a draft.

      She texted me a couple of hours later: the kittens had been given formula, been cleaned up and fallen asleep in a pile.

      Here's hoping for the best! One orange and white, one mostly black, one dark tabby and one that might be a dark tortie. I don't know which are boys or girls; at this age, they have only barely discovered that they're cats.

      As of this morning, the kittens are eating well and seem happy in their new home.