- Joined
- Sep 11, 2019
- Messages
- 20
- Purraise
- 63
Hi everyone! I live in NYC but waaaay out in Brooklyn, closer to Coney Island-- if you want an idea of how far removed we are from the center of the city, the nearest Starbucks is over a mile away and cost of living is actually still affordable because nobody wants to deal with the commute into Manhattan.
This makes my neighborhood a great environment for feral cats to live pretty comfortably, and it's compounded by the fact that most everyone around here far prefers having the cats in the area to having mouse and rat infestations. (I've lived in this neighborhood for over seven years and only seen one (1) rat. In NYC. Having grown up here, let me tell you, that's miraculous.)
I'd see the cats around on the street occasionally, but of course they never let me get near them...and then, one day in December 2016, I was working out and happened to look out of my window. I'd never really noticed the unused garage halfway down my block before, mostly because I have the awful habit of rarely wearing my glasses in my apartment, so I can't see that far. Anyway, I saw some blurry shapes moving on the roof of the garage, so I ran and got my glasses and discovered the blurry shapes were FURRY shapes! Cats!
Next step was to grab my camera, zoom in to 60x so I could get a good picture, and start snapping photos because I was so tickled that there were cats...on the roof of a garage?! Apparently a couple of the feral mamas-to-be were living in there and had decided to pop up onto the roof to clean themselves and get some sun. These are the first pictures I took:
The next day, I decided I'd look out my window again while I was working out, and again I was rewarded:
...and so on. The kitties on the left in the last and second-to-last image continued to come out on the roof quite frequently, so I gave them names-- the grey-and-white girl with the very pink nose became "Rosie" and the black kitty became "Pantera."
Now that I'd noticed the cats, I started seeing them everywhere! And, being a lifelong cat person, I also started to buy food to leave out for them. The other people in my neighborhood would leave out food too, but it was mostly kitchen scraps (leftover pierogi, kielbasa, bagels, smoked fish, discarded ham sandwiches, cheese...) so I wanted to leave something a little more, well, nutritious. Once I started doing this, some of the others in my building followed suit, and three years later there's a whole group of us leaving food and water out for the kitties.
One of the buildings a block over even leaves a window to their basement boiler room open so the cats can get in out of the elements! And the people there have recently started leaving actual cat food out as well.
I haven't been able to get close enough to the kitties that I can attempt any type of TNR endeavor, but I do have one success story: Grayson (you'll meet her in some later photos), who veeeeery slowly over the course of two years warmed up to me...and two and a half weeks ago, decided she'd had enough of life on the streets and followed me up four flights of stairs to my apartment! She plopped down on my bed, purring, like she's lived here her whole life, and has displayed exactly 0 urge to leave.
I'll update again with more photos, in chronological order! It's amazing how like a soap opera the lives of cats can be.
This makes my neighborhood a great environment for feral cats to live pretty comfortably, and it's compounded by the fact that most everyone around here far prefers having the cats in the area to having mouse and rat infestations. (I've lived in this neighborhood for over seven years and only seen one (1) rat. In NYC. Having grown up here, let me tell you, that's miraculous.)
I'd see the cats around on the street occasionally, but of course they never let me get near them...and then, one day in December 2016, I was working out and happened to look out of my window. I'd never really noticed the unused garage halfway down my block before, mostly because I have the awful habit of rarely wearing my glasses in my apartment, so I can't see that far. Anyway, I saw some blurry shapes moving on the roof of the garage, so I ran and got my glasses and discovered the blurry shapes were FURRY shapes! Cats!
Next step was to grab my camera, zoom in to 60x so I could get a good picture, and start snapping photos because I was so tickled that there were cats...on the roof of a garage?! Apparently a couple of the feral mamas-to-be were living in there and had decided to pop up onto the roof to clean themselves and get some sun. These are the first pictures I took:
The next day, I decided I'd look out my window again while I was working out, and again I was rewarded:
...and so on. The kitties on the left in the last and second-to-last image continued to come out on the roof quite frequently, so I gave them names-- the grey-and-white girl with the very pink nose became "Rosie" and the black kitty became "Pantera."
Now that I'd noticed the cats, I started seeing them everywhere! And, being a lifelong cat person, I also started to buy food to leave out for them. The other people in my neighborhood would leave out food too, but it was mostly kitchen scraps (leftover pierogi, kielbasa, bagels, smoked fish, discarded ham sandwiches, cheese...) so I wanted to leave something a little more, well, nutritious. Once I started doing this, some of the others in my building followed suit, and three years later there's a whole group of us leaving food and water out for the kitties.
One of the buildings a block over even leaves a window to their basement boiler room open so the cats can get in out of the elements! And the people there have recently started leaving actual cat food out as well.
I haven't been able to get close enough to the kitties that I can attempt any type of TNR endeavor, but I do have one success story: Grayson (you'll meet her in some later photos), who veeeeery slowly over the course of two years warmed up to me...and two and a half weeks ago, decided she'd had enough of life on the streets and followed me up four flights of stairs to my apartment! She plopped down on my bed, purring, like she's lived here her whole life, and has displayed exactly 0 urge to leave.
I'll update again with more photos, in chronological order! It's amazing how like a soap opera the lives of cats can be.