We knew one of our barn cats had her kittens in the old barn. Jack and I kept checking on them to make sure they were ok once a day. It had been raining the last 2 days , but he came in evey day to let me kniow, that even though he did not see the mother cat, the kittens were dry and quiet. This mrning that had al changed – all 5 kittens were very cold and wet, liveless ad not moving at all. We went to work with the hair dryer, towels and warm kitten milk replacer with some syrup. About 30 minutes later all 5 were finaly dry and had come back to live. They were sceaming their little lungs out, but I did not want to stuff them with too much rght away, so I put them in a box with warm towels in my annual kitten rescue refuge – my bathtub, just in case they start wandering and headed back out to the barn to check on the second litter, only a few days old. they were ok, mom was there, thanks God.

I had planned to take another ferral cat , one from last year, to the vet if I could get her to get in the crate. For abut 5 days I had watched her not put any weight on her left font paw, when the usual crowd of about 10 or so came for breakfast every morning. SoIi took cans with cat food out and started feeding her at first close to and then inside the crate. This morning I decided if the kitty did not show any sign of improvement de to the antibiotic that I had been mixing in the food, I would try to close the crate and take her to the vet – and that’s what I did after I saw that our horses had broken out and were rnning in one of our other pastures. Thanks God, Jack could close the gate on them, so no hurry there. i am glad we built so many funnels, runways  and gates everywhere, we can always convince them to go in one or the other pasture or pen, when loose. When they calmed down a bit, we can run them back into the their current winter pasture later today or tomorrow.

Now I have to wait what the vet tells me about the injured cat -  most often it is an infected  pucture wound from a fight or maybe even a broken leg. I know she must be scared sitting in a cage right now, but our vet has a lot of experience dealing with any size cats that are not very socialized.

In the mean time I fed the little ones with a surringe, now they are sleeping. Hope their kidneys recouperate.

Here is the first picture I took a few minutes ago

2-week old kittens

2-week old kittens