More trapping at Spring Hope

Last night we trapped another 13 cats from the Spring Hope colony.  That makes 38 spayed and neutered since April 11th (not counting one of the cats from last night - see below). 

One of the cats trapped last night was a new mama and the caregiver was able to show us where her babies were.  So crawled in the back of my SUV with a carrier, towel, and the trap, locked myself in, and transferred mama to the carrier and then put her babies in it with her.  She'll stay in my hall bathroom until her babies can eat on their own and then she'll be sterilized, vaccinated, ear cropped and returned to her colony.  While it's not ideal to keep them out of their colony for that long before returning them, this is a front yard colony and we can let her go in one of the sheds where she can reacclimate for a little while before running loose again.  She has the five cutest babies who seem to be about a week old.  Mama gets scared and hides behind the toliet when I go in that room, but she's taking good care of her babies.

We are making great strides with this project in a short amount of time.  Next time we trap, though, we are taking several extra traps (even if we have to take two cars) because we had quite a few "repeat offenders" last night and we'll need to just put them in time out next time we trap.

The almost 100-mile round trip (it's 94.7 miles) makes it a bit hard to do on a weeknight but last night, both of us were able to get out of work a little early and since my SUV was already loaded with clean traps, drop trap, towels, tarps, and trapping kit, we were able to get to the location while it was still light out and had at least an hour of trapping with light.  Makes it so much easier to do when it's light and there are so many black cats that keep going in the traps.  Can see a cropped ear very nicely in the light!  Of course, by the time we were done, it was dark and although we tried to take pictures, we were more concerned with trapping kitties and then it was too dark.  But we'll get more pictures soon.

Last night, we trapped 6 males and 7 females (1 of them being the mama above).  Quite a few females were pregnant.  We have prevented 60-80 kittens from being born in just a short time, since over two-thirds of the cats trapped so far have been female and pregnant.