Feral Cat Fridays: Is That Ms. Hutch?
Our feral cat colony had several extended families. The most extensive began with Mama, the first feral we befriended, and ended with her grandchildren when our trap, neuter, release (TNR) program succeeded. Hutch was one of Mama’s grandchildren and Fuzzy’s daughter.
Hutch was one of Batman’s siblings in a litter named after crime fighters. While Batman and Robin were barely distinguishable early on, it took longer to see the difference in Hutch and her sister Starsky. Their appearance and behavior were so similar that it was not unusual for us to mistake one of them for the other unless both appeared together, and those slight differences were hard to see until they neared maturity. I won’t swear that they never traded places before the names came to rest.
Hutch was friendly, but she was more of a rambler than Starsky and sometimes spent her day somewhere else. We would see Hutch wandering through the woods and up the hill in the morning after breakfast and she would return in the late afternoon for dinner. She would often return early for a walk in the woods with Loretta and George.
Where she went and what she did was a mystery, but her path through the woods until she was out of sight and her schedule were predictable. It’s a long way in that direction to the next house, so she may have just had a favorite private spot in the woods to relax. The colony could get a little hectic at times.
Hutch stayed closer to home later in life but never became as much of a homebody as her sister Starsky, who is still with us as one of the last 2 cats from the colony. Of course, Starsky might have originally been Hutch, for all we know. But either way, she left her mark on the colony and on us.
That last photo’s my favorite, by far. There’s something about a kitten, and there’s something even more about a group of kittens. Can’t you just hear one of them saying, “Hey, guys! Let’s go out there and make another run at that tree!”
Starsky and Hutch in the leaves are pretty darned cute, though.
Loretta and I also love that photo of the kittens climbing the tree. The photo quality isn’t very good because it is a reproduction from a scan she had to make after a major disk crash destroyed some photos before they were backed up, but the subject is just too good to let technical issues get in the way. That particular litter of kittens was one of the best. Fuzzy, their mother, was a favorite of the cats in the colony and of us. The kittens inherited Fuzzy’s positive social qualities through both nature and nurture.