Upper - sort of....

Kitten update.  They gone again.

On Sunday night we were awoken in the quiet hours by the plaintiff wail of a kitten distress calling.  Groggily F got up to look from the aft balcony, and eventually spied in the dark a small calico kitten huddled next to the fuel tank in the next door backyard.  No idea whose it is, no idea how it got there, can't reach it, go back to bed.

Restlessness. Lots of kitten wailing.  Some while later it became apparent that there were two kittens distress wailing, one stronger and louder than the other.  OK now this is weird.  4am.  Got up again and just in time to see Miss C and three kittens assembling themselves beside the neighbour's fuel tank and then disappearing off around the back of it.

Three weeks to the day that one of them dropped into our back yard, Miss C airlifted them out again, one by one.  It must have taken her over three hours, and was no mean feat.  There is no way we can adequately describe to you the heights and distances she must have leapt over with a 6-7 week old kitten in her mouth - 3 times.  There was no other way she could have done it (other than magic up a sky hook).  F is glad she didn't actually see it, as it would have been heart in mouth stuff.

Just as she reassembled her little family next door the heavens opened and we guess two of the three of them at least got a really thorough drenching as she still had some distance to go to get them down off the raised platform the fuel tank sits on and into whatever shelter she was heading for.  She grew up over there somewhere herself, and we guess that all along she had been trying to move her family to her kittenhood home.  One of them descending into our backyard in the process (and the other two being plucked down from the precarious corner they had wedged themselves into) had probably not been part of the original plan.

In the days before the relocation, we had seen her looking agitated and sizing up the distance up the first stage, it was clear she was planning to leap up.  We just never imagined that she was capable of achieving it carrying a kitten.  So we have been deprived of the entertainment of watching them from our balcony, but as she still turns up here for Effy's feline soup kitchen, we guess her little family will join her again in due course.  I wonder if they will remember us.

F seems to have been the only human to see them go.  The people in our building have asked us what happened to them, and were pleased to find out it was not a bad news event. We had the job of disposing of all the cardboard tunnels. The seagrass box scavenged from the rubbish and torn apart by their little claws went back to the bins.  Knotted ropes were taken down and the plants will eventually go to the garden across the road.  The yard looks very empty without them.

We hadn't taken many photos of them, preferring instead to simply watch their antics, and those of their Uncle Bro Cat who seemed to have adopted the role of tutor and chief supervisor of play.  (He has seemed rather lost since they moved on and we can't understand why he didn't relocate with them, he and his sister seemed to have a very sharing and at times kittenish relationship themselves and there was no agro over his interaction with the kittens.)  

We did get this one shot a couple of weeks ago of the tiniest calico, trying to sleep on the only patch of grass available to them - the catgrass growing in the yoghurt pot.  They fought over it daily, played king of the castle, pushed one another off it, and pranced about in its drooping fronds.  We started putting more plants out there but nothing at all was of interest to them other than this tiny circle of grass.

 We hope they have a more enriched environment in their new home.