The new tenant in my recovery room

In a way, you could say I've got kittens staying with me, but they all still efficiently packed inside their mom.  This is Honey, who was just trapped tonight.

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Bad photo, wonderful cat.  She looks like Caramel from last fall, but she's even lighter in color.  The volunteer who trapped her and I both think she's less than a year old.  And she's visibly pregnant, but hopefully not too pregnant to have a termination with her spay early next week.  I named her Honey because of her golden color and because she's really sweet.  The trapper said she was patting her before she went into the trap.  And when I opened the trap into the mouth of the cage, she took a hard right to go out of the cage door and started past me for the hallway, as though she were thinking, "Oh, is this my house now?"  I gently guided her back the right way, and she didn't mind me touching her, either.

She started eating right away, because pregnant feral cats never get enough to eat.  (Now that it's spring, our group has been trapping a lot of pregnant cats.  Which is better than having to try and catch mom and kittens later, which is what I expect to be doing at one of my colonies next weekend.)  Honey finished all the wet food I gave her very quickly, so I decided to give her a can of kitten food.  As I leaned into the cage to scoop it into the bowl, she rubbed her head against my hand.  Awwww.  And after I left her to eat, when she finished that, she meowed through the closed door to tell me she was done.  When they meow, that's telling.  It means they've established a relationship to humans.  Only tame cats and kittens meow.  Later, even without food in my hands, she was happy to be petted and get head rubs.  We appear to have a really tame one here.

On the down side, for those who were following the saga, Bunny's sister Sophie had to be let go.  She was not going to tame up without months and months of work, and even then she could have been problematic on moving from the foster home to a permanent home.  And the time and resources it would have taken could better go to getting a succession of other cats spayed and neutered and through recovery.  Her trapper/fosterer was sad to see her go, but Sophie goes back out there spayed and vaccinated, to a more comfortable life than pumping out kittens every few months, in a colony that gets fed and monitored for injury or illness by caring people.

So that's Caturday coming to a close here in Toronto.  It's been a full one.