First Time Mother

by Kymhorsell
(Melbourne, Australia)

I live next to a block of flats. Apart from loud "doof doof" music at 3 am and sucklike this means every Jan/Feb there's another stray kitten as the latest "Christmas present" is abandoned, or a uni student moves back home and decides they can't take their pet with them.

For years I kept my distance from these strays. But over the past couple of years I've started to take them in.

Last Feb (2009) I took in a then-8 week old (some people told me it was 12 weeks, but I have my doubts) tortoiseshell female. She has lovely colouring. White, black, brown, gray, with white hind legs and white sox on front.

She's always slept inside (usually on top of or next to me), and I've tried to keep an eye on her. But she has managed to give me the slip a few times - coming in late with no reasonable explanation.

6 months on and "Saussage" developed a raging appetite, a fat belly and swelling nipples. There were 2 possible explanations. (Forgive me, I'm new to cat-ology). My guess was the idea she had swallowed a giant tapeworm was probably not the right one.

I built 2 nesting boxes in reasonable places. She didn't like either one. She tried to make a couple of nests of her own in the last 6 hours of pregnancy - one in a pile of physics textbooks (now just slightly worse for wear); another in a pile of plastic bubble-wrap jammed between a coffee table and bedroom wall. She didn't seem to like either of her own efforts, either.

So around midnight on 8 Nov 2009 I was woken by clawing at my leg. She was laying with her back to my leg, purring loudly (sometimes a sign a cat is afraid and would just LIKE to be happy). She had picked a bad time. This was the week where Melbourne (Australia) was having a 100-y record heatwave - so far at least 4 days over 32 deg C.

Squeaking and contractions started. I was quite happy to have her give birth on the bed. The quilt is old and I was going to recycle it as cat bedding sooner rather than later anyway.

But right then one of my "cat alarms" (various contraptions on the cat-flap and outside around the house) went off. Usually this means one of the neighbourhood toms is prowling around and needs chasing off before they end up in the kitchen scoffing down food meant for my own brood.

At the sound "mother" growled, jumped up, and ran outside. I thought this meant birth would be happening in the back yard somewhere. But a couple minutes later she came back in and selected yet another nesting location. A cat bed I bought 6 months back and neither of my animals had until now shown any interest in sitting in/on.

As contractions started up again I found I needed to modify the cat bed a bit. It had a rather soft cushion on the bottom, that tended to make "Saussage" curl up during a contraction. So I pulled out the pillow (somehow around the struggling mother) and substituted an old blue woolen cardigan. Mother could now lay down or get up into a stoop, as required. A combo of these 2 were needed to make the deliveries.

After 10 mins of struggle and a few loud squeaks the first kitten popped out. Even as a new mom she knew enough to open the membrane, lick the kitten, and eat the afterbirth.

I encouraged the kitten over to a nipple (at least 3 seemed to be quite full) and it started nursing, fine.

After the first a new kitten popped out every 45 mins or so. Each time she cleaned them up, and we shuffled it over to a new nippled.

We ended up with 2 males and 1 female. The firstborn, a male tentatively named "Hewie" (not the Disney spelling, but so what?), was mostly white with a beautiful swirl of black across his back. The other 2 looked much like their mother, the "Louie" (2nd born male) having quite a lot of jet black fur.

Even at just a couple of hours old Louie and Dewie were fighting over "nipple 1" (under the front shoulder). Despite some gentle prodding, neither seemed willing to give up what seems like prime kitten real-estate. It is sometimes funny to see them navigate over to "mother", apparently using the location of her leg to guide them. The funny part happens when they accidentally navigate by her hind leg rather than front leg. Each has ended up under her tail apparently wondering "I left dinner around here somewhere; where's it moved to now?".

Mommy seemed to be quite happy to have had the company and my fumbling assistance during birth. She's more or less told me so every chance she gets over the past few days.

I look in on the new family every hour or 2 during the day (every 4 or 5 hrs at night), giving momma a tickle under the chin and some encouraging words and maybe some prime cat food. I've also been keeping her locked inside so she can't go out visiting any boyfriends for a week or so.

The whole birth experience was rather touching.

The only sour note so far came last night (11 Nov 2009) around 2 am when I found "Hewie" newly-dead at 3 days old.

I'd noticed for a few hours before he was acting strangely. Instead of curling up in a heap with his brother and sister he had been usually off in a corner by himself. A couple of times "mother" was just sitting on top of him. When awake he seemed to "trash around" and even try to suckle on the towel that now lines the nesting box.

About 2 hours before I found him dead, I'd tried to feed him some commercial kitten milk through a cleaned worming syringe I had laying around. While he seemed awake and even reacted immediately to having his feet touched, he'd refused to lick the drop off his chin.

A bit of Google-ing has not shone any light onto what happened.

But another ominous sign also showed up in the last day or so that may explain it. When one of her kittens squeaks too much and "Saussage" picks it up and starts biting it (one or two squeaks in greeting seems OK; but I've seen a kitten drop off a nipple and start squeaking - maybe because the well has run dry - and that triggered this behaviour). I don't mean trying to pick it up by the scruff. I mean putting the kitten's whole head in her mouth and repeatedly biting down, or putting the throat in her mouth and biting down a couple of times. So far she had put the kitten down and gone back to nursing when I loudly say "no" a few times.

This biting thing may hark back to her early experience with field-mice in the back yard. My other stray has managed once or twice to kill a mouse and present it to his mother (i.e. me). "Saussage" managed to get ahold of one of these after I'd tried to hide it in the compost heap. She was happy as Larry for a few minutes, chewing on it, and tossing it in the air. She even growled (for the first time I'd heard) at me when I tried to take it away.

When she was biting on her kittens "Saussage" seemed to have the same excited stare she had when she was chewing and playing with that mouse. Maybe the squeaking of her kittens sets her off. She is - as I said - a first time mother.