KITTENS!!!!

We woke up to newborn kittens on our outside sofa this morning!

It has been raining a lot these past few days in Spain (thankfully, our area has not been hit by flash floods and total devastation, the deaths and damage further south is heartbreaking), so everything is soaked. A mother cat needed a dry place to have her babies and found our outdoor sofa on the terrace. She had her kittens there during the night, so when my husband came downstairs this morning he saw what he initially thought might be something I’d left outside to air overnight! And then he looked closer and saw that it was a tortoiseshell cat with four tiny kittens curled up together! The mother was out for the count for quite a while; I came down soon after my husband and we were able to admire them through the window for quite a long time before she woke up, saw us and became a little unsettled.

So, we backed off and left her alone while we had her breakfast. She had two grey kittens, as well as one black, and one ginger. The ginger kitten was clearly the strongest; it was elbowing the others out of the way and kicking like mad to feed, and was noticeably bigger than them.

BUT THEY WERE ALL SOOOO CUTE! 

I had to leave for an appointment in Girona, so my husband took over kitten watch, but a gardener arrived next door with a leaf blower and the poor mama cat got scared and ran away, coming back a little later to carry away the ginger kitten. Sadly, four hours later she still hadn’t returned for the others, who were getting cold, and there were leaflblowers on full blast everywhere, so the mother wouldn’t have dared come back. We tried to call a few local cat associations, and a vet; the vet said he couldn’t do anything, and the associations didn’t respond. We brought the kittens into the house and put them in a basket with a little towel to keep them warm, and googled how to feed newborn kittens (a full time job…) and then a HERO showed up!

This hero, Sergio, is also a gardener where we live (on a golf course near Girona), and he’d heard about the kittens from the other gardeners (apparently all the resort gardeners came to see them while I was away!), and came to have a look. He asked me if he could have one, and I said of course, and that he could take them all, but did he know how to feed them? He said he did, that he’d done it before, and has another cat, so he took them and looked so gentle and sweet and delighted standing there with his little basket of kittens, so HURRAY! I hope they’ll grow up to live good cat lives. I hope we see the poor Mama with her ginger baby around. She looked so tired and skinny.

Sergio said he’d keep me posted on how the go on.

Fingers crossed!

Thanks for reading,

Cesca xx