I am obsessed with shelter. Mine and the feral cats we watch over. Luckily, my house, however unkempt and run-down, is pretty sturdy. I get antsy when I worry that the skylight may not be watertight, or the cellar may be taking on water. But so far we've been lucky (well, we did have a bunch of plumbing work done to ensure the cellar won't flood).

So my attention ends up mostly being about the cats' shelter.We already have a number of shelters out back, but some are starting to fall apart and will need to be replaced. I built most of them, so I'm always trying to figure out how to build a shelter that will last forever and need zero maintenance.  In the past couple of months, I built a few types of cat houses, as well as purchased a ready-made shelter.

The ready-made one is a FeralVilla, a particularly handsome and resilient shelter. Made of plywood and shingles, it looks good in the yard and last years without much maintenance. We got one several years ago and it's still going strong, so we thought it a wise investment to get another one (they cost around $100). It's probably overkill, but I like having some houses to spare in case others need them.

I built a few shelters out of Rubbermaid containers I bought from Sears, these containers are great for shelters, they have  a rounded roof which is latched for easy opening. The inside is lined with rigid insulation and Styrofoam, the floor is covered with vinyl tiles to protect the foam, and a 6" hole is cut for entry using an unwieldy drill attachment. I'm able to grind these out pretty quickly; ultimately I'd love to be able to sell these to other feral cat advocates to use with their own colonies, but it's hard to have enough time to build up an inventory.

Last month I purchased a bunch of plywood and rigid insulation and set about building my own shelter inspired by the FeralVilla. I didn't really know what I was doing, I just started cutting the panels and figuring it out as I went along. Now that it's complete I can take the measurements to make them with greater precision. But all told it's not a bad start.

Like the FV, my shelter has a pitched roof to drain water (a serious issue for flat-topped shelters made out of storage bins), has 'feet' to keep it off the ground, and has 2 levels inside. The FV's ground level has no floor and is really more of a wind-break. I decided to build an actual ground floor to give cats the opportunity to stay there if they don't want to brave the penthouse. The house has 2 entrance doors, although there's only one entrance to the upper level. I would like to add a second entrance to the top but this will compromise its insulating abilities.  Each level is lined with rigid insulation and I included one of our Holofil cat pillows to give the cat something to nest on.

I covered the top in roofing material and painted the whole thing with gray exterior paint. I would have like a more jazzy color but the neutral gray is good for not attracting attention. When I set it up my neighbor thought it was a compost bin. I think that's a good thing, since I don't want anyone messing with it. I put the shelter out front since we didn't have any there (and it looks better than a plastic storage tote). So far there's only been one regular visitor, a new cat to us. She's a tuxedo cat with a collar on, and has outsmarted our every attempt to catch her thus far. She's probably an abandoned pet, so we're hoping to win her over soon.

I know most of our regular ferals have roosts elsewhere but I hope they use this house if they need it. I think it will last us a long time so in time I hope the cats will see it as just another part of their landscape and not suspect it's another type of trap like they fell for before! Next up: building an incognito cat shelter out of our old garbage cans!

See all the shelters I've been building in my flickr collection: Feral Cat Outdoor Shelters

I am getting tired of writing posts like these. Last year we lost several cats for one reason or another, and I figured we were done with these stories for a while. But a few days ago we lost another feral, possibly two.

George has been a fixture in our yard since we moved in. He was one of the first cats I spied out back, roosting on a fallen fence. When we TNR'd him along with several other ferals, he grew close to Mugsy, the charismatic orange tabby whose personality came to define our little colony. They were inseparable, so when Mugsy was hit by a car last summer, we feared George would be lonely. But cats aren't sentimental; George soon struck up a friendship with Blue, another of the yard's regulars. Blue himself had lost his confidante, Edmund, the previous spring, who had died of old age. George and Blue spent most of their time together, and when we took on a whole new colony of young cats, became the grandfathers of the colony. They shared a big shelter and spent their days lounging on a cat bed protected from the elements. Even though they were both at least 6 or 7, I expected them to live many more years. Sadly this wasn't the way it worked out.

Friday I came outside, noting what appeared to be a ragged piece of fabric in the snow on top of the plywood that covers the shelter area. When I looked closer I realized it was the matted fur of George. He was frozen solid and surrounded by blood. I had to pour hot water around his body to get him out of the ice; later I had to pour hot water around the plywood to get rid of the blood splashed onto the snow.

I don't know what happened to him. Something got him and tore him up. I thought maybe the fight had happened elsewhere and he dragged himself back home to die, but there was no blood anywhere else in the yard. Whatever happened, happened here.

The rest of the colony had been scared by the incident and most were hiding in a nearby abandoned house. It took a few days for them all to come back and be counted, but one was still missing: Blue. There has been no sign of him since Thursday night. I am not optimistic I will see him again. Blue was a gentle, fat cat, who liked to keep his food bowl in plain sight at all times. He is not one to run off and not come back, so I can only assume that whatever got George also got Blue. But what could do this to a cat?

Out best guess is a raccoon. We know they live near and often come by in the summer to see if there's any leftover cat food. There have never been any serious incidents between cat and raccoon populations, but perhaps the raccoon was starving, rabid, or in the midst of a mating season frenzy. Other theories include coyotes or possibly even humans.  I don't really think a person could have done this, but only because I think George was far too wary of people to be caught. As familiar as I was to him, he still ran when I came out to feed him, and he has been too smart to trap since we first caught him 2008. I can certainly imagine a person doing this just because they hate cats and hate people who don't hate cats, but I think George would have outsmarted someone like that.

If Blue doesn't turn up soon, it means our entire original feral colony is effectively gone. Several of that first round of TNR cats have been turned into house cats (Augie, Tuxedo), and the others are now dead (George, Mugsy) or disappeared (Baxter, Blue). Of course there are now many more cats that have become a part of our colony, but there was something special about that original bunch, they learned how to be TNR cats just as we were learning how to be TNR people.

I'll update this post if we ever find Blue or what really happened.

UPDATE: Last night, Blue showed up, apparently no worse for the wear. He seemed a little skittish but then, he is a feral and I was shoving a camera in his face. He's now the old-timer of the colony, I hope he finds a new pal among the young folk.

But for now, I just want to memorialize George, the longhaired gray tuxedo cat. He always looked grouchy but was actually very playful. He and Mugsy were a good team; he groomed Mugsy constantly, eventually catching the same ear condition that gave Mugsy his tilted head look (we eventually got Mugsy's ear fixed and had still planned to get George fixed up as well). George also had friendships with Jumbee and of course Blue. Apparently he had a thing for other gray cats. We can never know his full story but we are glad we got to spend some time with him; it should have been a lot longer. Some photos are below, here's his full album.

One of the first photos I took of George in 2007 (with Tuxedo)

George at his finest

Mugsy and George, salad days

Our original crew, now possibly all gone (Blue, George, Mugsy, Edmund)

I have been thinking of alternatives to straw for a while. Straw is the go-to insulator for cat shelters, but I had a hard time finding it this year. Not to mention, it's messy in use and hard to clean up in the spring. So I tried to find something reusable to replace it.

I wanted something that would insulate as well as straw, be pliant and water-tolerant like straw, but allow for easy cleaning and reuse. In my Boy Scout days we learned Hollofil, the synthetic material used to stuff sleeping bags. It purported to feel like down (not really), was as warm but unlike feathers, didn't lose insulation ability when wet. I looked around online and found a place to order a roll of Hollofil. At first I thought about just stuffing the raw batting into the shelters, but I quickly realized we would need fabric to cover it. Not knowing where else to go, we visited Mood Fabrics (you know, that place they always go to on Project Runway).

Mood was pretty cool (the building still uses an elevator with an old dude controlling its movement with that maritime-type lever thingy), if overwhelming. We didn't buy anything but we left knowing we would need a synthetic fabric that would be strong enough while allowing the finished product to hold its shape somewhat.

I went to Rite Aid (across the street from the house) that night and saw they were selling those not-quite-big-enough-for-practical-use fleece throws; they were on sale for a dollar each! The fleece fabric is thin and a bit suspect in the longevity department. But I couldn't argue with the price (about 50 cents a yard)! Plus the dimensions were nearly perfect to what we had in mind: wide enough to creep up the walls of the shelter and long enough to cover the floor.

We broke out the sewing machine (which we admittedly bought specifically for this project, but we think we'll use it for other stuff, eventually) and once we figured out how to use it, we started stitching. We just sewed the fleece together, cut off enough Hollofil to fill it, then sewed up the open end. We fit the resulting 'pillow' into the cat house and prodded the indoor cats to test it out. Decatur went inside and didn't come out for an hour. Success!

We made several more, including one variation on the theme in which we cut the blanket into 14 small pillows. We're hoping that if we pile these inside a shelter, the cats will figure out how to burrow underneath, but it's hard to know how we'll be able to tell what they do with it.  Several houses now have the Hollofil pillows in them, so we'll try to monitor their use to see which ones get the most traffic. Despite the logic and thought we put into all of this, the real challenge is getting all the cats to use the houses properly. We're distributing catnip to increase traffic, but it's too early to to tell yet what the adoption rate will be. At least I feel a little better that they will be covered when it gets really cold.

Nifty shows off his new home in our yard

The Eldert Street TNR cats have all been released … in our yard.

We had been thinking that our neighbor was overly burdened with cats she wasn't even sure she wanted, so we decided it was worth the gamble to release the cats in our yard. The cats, although territorial, should be able to figure out where they were from and could decide if they wanted to stay with us or go home. So when they were ready we set them loose and noted that nearly every cat seemed to know right where to go (the hole in the chain link fence in the back) so I suspect many of them had already been over here).

Within a couple of days we started seeing some of the crew hanging around in back. Phinneas, the orange tabby, was most prominent. He and Annie the calico, would even come right up to the house to peer in at us! Nifty, the kitten we trapped separately, also decided to stay, moving in to one of the outdoor shelters we have around the yard. Others have shown their face, but the final group has yet to reveal itself. Our neighbor has reported that some of the other cats have returned to her yard, so our theory seems to be working.

Once we know how many are staying in our yard, we can make arrangement for winter. We already have a lot of cat houses, but more may be needed. I will try to get the neighbor to set some in her yard, too, since god knows where her cats have been living through out the winter.

Overall, the whole project has come through incredibly well, and we are very grateful to our friends who helped make it possible. We fixed 8 females and 7 males, which means there are countless kittens that will not be born. I was surprised how many females there were, that's a lot of kitten factories shut down! But there is still a mother cat out there, the neighbor is tracking her and will alert us once the kittens start to show themselves. Then we will grab them all and the Eldert colony will be a thing of the past.

Welcome home, Phinneas!

Mugsy from 2008

Last Sunday night/Monday morning, our feral cat Mugsy was hit by a car and killed. It's been pretty rough this week, coping with the news and trying to make sense of it. Those of you familiar with what we do and this cat in particular know this is no regular loss of cat. In the TNR world, you learn to get used to casualties. The cats we fix go back to the streets and the streets are dangerous, no matter what we do to minimize their struggles. It's an imperfect solution but is better than no solution. But none of this helps in this case. We miss our cat.

Mugsy was one of the first street cats we noticed when we moved here in 2006. He was filthy and scroungy, sleeping on an old blanket on a pile of trash. He was a strange looking cat, with eyes deep-set and wide apart. We didn't really get to know him until after we started TNR in earnest, fixing him and several other cats on the block. Post-neuter, he started hanging around George a lot, and soon the two essentially became a couple. They did everything together and were rarely seen alone. George helped Mugsy clean himself up and soon he was a relatively well put-together orange tabby cat. He had a sweet disposition, and even though he was a true feral he clearly wanted to be friends with us humans. We never were able to touch him, but he let us get close without fleeing the way most ferals do.

Mugsy was the alpha cat of the yard, all the other ferals deferred to him. He wasn't bossy and he didn't keep the cats in line with aggressive behavior, he had a charisma that made the other cats want to be in his graces. When he came onto the patio, he would often have trouble getting to the food bowl for all the cats trying to bump heads with him. He was already old for a street cat, and as I have reported here, a few months ago we trapped him and took him to the vet to get some of his issues sorted out. He spent almost two weeks recovering in a room in our house, probably his only significant time in a house in his whole life. He didn't like being confined (or being wrapped in a sheet to have ear medicine administered), but he liked the comfort of a bed to sleep in and unlimited food available. When he returned to the yard, he was healthier than he had been in years, and he was seen frolicking like a kitten on a number of occasions.

Last Monday we didn't see him and suspected something was up. By Wednesday we still hadn't seen him and very getting spooked. On Thursday, Jeannie walked around the neighborhood and asked a guy if he had seen him. He knew exactly who she was talking about. Turns out Mugsy is known among a lot of the old-timers in the neighborhood, and this one, Cliff, had seen him since he was a kitten (he was 8 or 9 according to him). A friend of Cliff's had found "that gold cat" on the far corner a block from our house, struck by a car Monday morning. Cliff explained that all the feral cats roam over a several-block range, crossing the streets at will and hitting several homes that put out food. We had no idea Mugsy was in the practice of going much of anywhere, we thought he spent 90% of his time in our yard. But apparently they still get around, as far away as two block over. I'm not even sure how they get over there, aside from taking the sidewalks all the way.

We have been pretty devastated by the news about Mugsy, we had expected several more years with him, and coming so soon after losing Edmund, it seems like a pretty lousy summer so far. Despite being full of cats, the yard has a palpable void, we keep feeling like he's going to show up, that Cliff's friend was mistaken and had found a different gold cat on the corner. But it's been a full week and the yard remains monochromatic (all the remaining cats are shades of gray for some reason). George is doing okay but I'm sure he misses his friend. Luckily he has recently gotten close with Jumbee, one of youngest ferals, so that may take some of the sting out. For us humans, however, there is no cushion.

We keep talking about him and how this could have happened. A nine year old cat who spent his entire life here should know better than to cross the street with cars speeding at him. But he was getting older and I already suspected his hearing wasn't so hot, so maybe that had something to do with it. No amount of speculation or theorizing makes it easier of course. Eventually we'll feel better about it, but for now it just sucks.

I hope to write a better eulogy for Mugsy than this, I don't think I'm able to properly describe him. But suffice it to say he started off as just another alley cat and quickly became the heart of this whole cat operation. He was just a cat but he had personality; he seemed to appreciate what we did for him at a deeper level than most of the others. We hope we gave him a better life than he would have had otherwise, but we got something out of it too. That's what will be the hardest to accept.

Mugsy's full photo album.

the yard just isn't the same without you buddy