A few months ago a female cat suddenly appeared hanging around our home and as usual, I began to feed her. After a few weeks we noticed that she was looking increasingly bigger around her tummy and Angela asked me if I thought she was pregnant. But with so many cats having FIP at the time, I at first assumed she was bloated for that reason, a common symptom of that illness.
As time went on we continued to look after our new found cat until one morning she came back to the house looking noticeably slimmer. I assumed of course, that she had given birth to kittens somewhere on our site. But several weeks went by without a sign of any kittens although she kept disappearing somewhere, as though she may be feeding her young elsewhere. Then one morning, the mother cat suddenly appeared carrying one of her offspring towards our house. I welcomed them both and prepared a place for them. The mother cat then disappeared once again but she did not return that day or the next. Our main concern was to feed the little kitten she had brought to us who was only about four weeks old.
Fortunately, the kitten was able to eat some solid food but he was by no means weaned and was crying for his mother and her milk.
I looked everywhere for the mother cat, but not a sign of her anywhere. I was concerned because there may be other kittens who needed a mother if she had been hit by a car or some other problem.
But as I was just about to return home after feeding some other site cats, I heard a little cry from somewhere, and I could not trace the cry at first until I looked up. To my amazement and initial joy, there was the mother cat, a little face peering down at me from high up on one of our neighbour’s roof, right at the top, not the lower roof. Our neighbour later told us he had left a ladder up on one of their balconies which had later removed.
Meanwhile the mother cat had climbed up to the rooftop with two of her offspring and could not get down when the ladder was removed, and this is why she had been missing. We were very lucky that our neighbour Artur and his mother, were very helpful in assisting my attempts to rescue the cats. The two kittens could now be seen playing on the roof of the house without a care in the world. Unfortunately, the ladder to the top roof of the house was very steep, and although I witnessed an attempt by the mother cat to carry one of her young down the ladder, it also had unusually wide spaces between the steps. The mother thought better of it and went back to the relative safety of the tiled roof above.
So next, with the permission of the owner’s of the house, I climbed up the ladder on the outside balcony and up onto the roof to assess the situation. It immediately became apparent that I would not be able to approach the kittens as they scampered away to hide behind a chimney. Any attempt to catch them this way may have ended in disaster if one of the kittens had fallen off the roof.
But I had an idea, in the past I had considered what I would do if an animal needed to climb up or down a place where it was trapped. I had decided the best thing to do, would be to tear up an old sheet and in this case, lower it down from the top roof and down the side of the ladder so the mother and her kittens could climb down the sheet with secure claws.
To our dismay, this did not happen. The mother cat seemed happy just to come down to our house for food and feed the one kitten she had left with us, then return to our neighbour’s roof where she could feed her other two offspring. We decided to wait for a few days.
Then several days later disaster struck. Our neighbour told us he had heard some kind of commotion during the night involving the cats on their roof. Perhaps an owl had made an attack on the kittens and the mother had managed to fight it off. Her babies knew they must run for cover and unfortunately had both jumped down a ventilation shaft and fallen right down to the bottom almost to ground level. The people living on both sides of the ventilation shaft said they could hear the kittens crying endlessly for their mother.
It was not until the following day that I was made aware of this, so the kittens, only few weeks old, had already been trapped down there over night and most of the following day. I went up onto the roof again to shine a torch down the shaft and I could see that somehow they had climbed about half way up to meet their waiting mother, but kept falling back down. It was a good opportunity to test my torn blanket theory and I lowered it down the chimney but it did not seem to help in this instance, although logically it was a sound idea. Maybe the kittens were afraid of people at the top if they tried to climb out. So of course, they had to be fed.
I lowered some wet cat food and water down the ventilation shaft and for four more days and nights that is all we could do with a view to hoping the kittens would eventually climb out.
The next problem I foresaw, was the problem of almost complete darkness and the effect of that on the kitten’s eyes, small kittens whose eyes do not open in time, can go blind. So I also lowered a torch with fully charged batteries down the shaft to keep the eyes of the young cats stimulated.
Eventually, we had people from the animal welfare charity ARK come around to see if they could help, and then the fire brigade came, but there was little they could do with a private house.
Some local people also came to help and encourage the owner’s of the house to get the kittens out by any means. So it was decided, that with the help of Paul, a local builder from the UK, that we would make a small hole in the kitchen wall near to the base of the ventilation shaft, and attempt to remove the kittens that way.
Well, I am happy to say, the operation was a complete success. I firstly pushed the mother cat into the hole so that her head was visible to her babies, and then pushed some food up into the hole we had made. The kittens were very hungry and I was able to grab both of them whilst they were eating and place them into a covered cat cage. I then took them with me to be with their sibling and mother back at our house.
I was mindful to protect their eyes from the bright sunlight outside until they could acclimatize after their ordeal. There was one other endearing twist to this story, and that was that during the trauma of being parted from her two babies, the mother cat adopted a new little black kitten about the same age of her own, that had somehow found its way to our home. All is well.
So finally, a special thanks to all those who made this rescue possible; to the owner’s of the house from where the kittens were rescued, Artur and his mother, for their patience and kindness, to the local people who came to offer their compassionate support, including the three young men on behalf of the animal charity ARK, and the local Kusadaşi fire department, to Angela for her phone calls which helped to co-ordinate the rescue, and finally to Paul for his donated time and work to free the kittens, he knocked a hole into the kitchen wall at the bottom of the ventilation shaft where they had fallen, and later repaired it.
So thanks to everyone for their invaluable efforts to resolve this situation in the best interests of the kittens. Thank you, God bless us all’
Nicholas John-Child
