The Roofcats Of Bensonhurst

Skippyandjif

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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. :lol:

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. :lovecat3:

I'll update again with more photos, in chronological order! It's amazing how like a soap opera the lives of cats can be.
 
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Skippyandjif

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...And of course my images didn't upload. Sorry! Here they are in the order they were supposed to go:
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The girl on the left is Rosie. Look at that nose! :lovecat3:

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The girl on the left here is Pantera. Her father(?) is going to be a figure of some purr-ominence (heh) later...
 
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Skippyandjif

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Furballsmom Furballsmom you're welcome! :)

I'm going in chronological order here so we're still in December 2016 with the photographs...while I was teaching and doing my PhD in physics, looking out my window every day while I worked out and observing the kitties was a great stress reliever. Watching a sleeping cat is so soothing, apparently even to other cats:

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And Rosie's sister, whom I ended up calling Zatanna (because, like the comic book character, she's kind of mischievous and "wears" black and white), showed up for the first time! She and Rosie would prove to be inseparable, so it's only fitting that their story will end how it does (and it ends happily for them, don't worry). She's like a more-saturated copy of Rosie-- identical spots but black instead of grey:

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S-T-R-E-E-E-E-T-C-H

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They ended up doing this mirror-image thing a lot, it was hilarious.
And sometimes a seagull or one of the Brooklyn College parrots would fly over and this was A Very Important Event:

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But mostly, they would nap in the sun and groom themselves. Rosie would make the cutest sleeping faces:

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Right before I was about to go visit my mom and brother for the holidays, I saw my first tomcat! Unfortunately, my first pictures of him were kind of like those ultra-blurry photos of "Bigfoot" because he wouldn't stay still, but you can still see his gorgeous green eyes:

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(My next photo of him was better, though. He was a big fella! And so glossy.)

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And since December in NYC is usually pretty mild, it was purr-fect weather to hang out on a warm roof...

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...and relaaaaax:

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These were my last pictures for 2016. I'd only been photographing the cats for a week at this point but I'd already bought a bag of cat food so I could leave out meals after I saw one of the kitties munching away on a pierogi. (Although they're delicious, they're not terribly high in the nutrients cats need.)

Next time: 2017! More tomcats! And an artsy shot of Zatanna on a snowy roof!
 
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Skippyandjif

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I came back from Maine in January 2017 and got back into my daily routine: wake up, work out, go to the lab, come home, put out food for the feral kitties... But there was somebody new around!

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This little Siamese-looking cat whom I nicknamed Aarti had shown up. I still have no idea if she's always been feral, if she's stray, abandoned, or what, but two and a half years later she's still here and still won't let me get near her.
(Here's my very circuitous logic as to the name: "Siamese and Garfunkel! Haha." "Wait, no offense to Mr. Garfunkel but that last name isn't dainty enough for this cat." "Can't name her Paula Siamese, my aunt is Paula and that would be strange." "So it's gotta be Art...but she's a girl...WAIT A SECOND one of my favorite chefs on the Food Network is named Aarti! Aarti it is.")

I also discovered the kitty at the top of this picture, and in the following one, is a boy. He's just very chubby, he seems to have people who feed him. (I'd thought he was female, and pregnant, but nope, he never slims down, he's just well-fed.) So I decided to nickname him William Catner. I mean, he has the "toupee" and all... :D

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The gorgeous black tomcat also showed up again, but something had happened to one of his ears.

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:bawling: I have no idea if that was from another cat or one of two very aggressive dogs that live in my neighborhood, but that one ear was gone. I started calling him "Poor Dear with a Missing Ear" and that became his name. Poor guy wouldn't let anybody near him so I couldn't bring him in to the vet (and believe me, I wanted to)-- he'd cross the street if he saw a person approaching him up the block. It broke my heart seeing him like this and I wanted to take him home and absolutely spoil him...I have a soft spot for black cats.

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Still managed to be king of the neighborhood though. Here he is with his probably-daughter Pantera.

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Aarti began to show up more and more. The people in the house next to my apartment building have an unneutered (:disappointed:, I know) male Siamese that she apparently developed a crush on-- they told me she likes to stand outside their windows and tease him. Oh dear. She's apparently still doing this as of last month, because I saw her walking back and forth in front of their basement window...

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Rosie and Aarti made friends at some point.

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I'd watch them on the roof playing with each other and wish they lived with me...I mean how cute are they??

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Just more glamour shots of Rosie. She's very pretty.

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This beautiful fella showed up! I nicknamed him Chuckers. I have no idea where he came from, but he usurped Rosie's spot on the roof.

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She didn't seem to mind much.

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Or maybe she did...?

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I couldn't tell if she had a kitty crush and was trying to get his attention, or just wanted him to get out of her space on the roof.

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Poor Dear showed up and glowered, very Batman-like, at Chuckers...

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...and Rosie got her space back.

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I really couldn't get over how cute this cat was! THAT NOSE.

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And Poor Dear seemed to be healing, which I was glad to see, since he wouldn't let me near him to help...

Next time: Rosie and Pantera do a funny little "my shadow is acting funny!" routine; Rosie takes a nap and I capture it in time-lapse; and two (!!!) new tomcats enter the scene.

(I looked and apparently the artsy shot of Zatanna in the snow isn't for a bit, oops.)
 
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Skippyandjif

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fionasmom fionasmom Thank you so, so, so much! I do eventually want to write a couple of graphic novels/comics about the kitties. :) I was posting them on my Tumblr blog for a while but I'm awful at keeping more than 1 or 2 social media accounts updated at a time, haha.

We're still in January of 2017-- there were so many kitties hanging out on the roof that month! It was sunny, not too snowy, and even a little warmish on a couple days. Perfect lounging weather, and lounge they did:

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Pantera and Rosie liked to hang out on the roof. If Rosie and Zatanna were a cat and a super-saturated cat, Rosie and Pantera were a cat and her shadow.

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(Although sometimes the shadow was on a time delay...) :lol:
I also managed to capture on film (...er, digital camera space) Rosie falling asleep...and waking for a second...and falling back asleep...and so on. Kept pressing that photo button and got kind of a time-lapse effect:

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...Whew! Finally asleep, haha.

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February came, and I was lucky enough to photograph William Catner making a really funny face. Anytime I was feeling down that month, I'd look at this and laugh a bit. He looks like he just smelled a sock or something. :lol:

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Rosie's shadow was off duty so her reflection took over providing neat photo opportunities. Chuckers was also still coming around now and then.

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"No, no, Zatanna, you do what I do but OPPOSITE!"

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The kitties would also attack the tarp sometimes when they were feeling playful. This was like the fifth tarp I'd seen on that roof since I moved in...I guess this is why.

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(I just enjoyed the composition of this picture. Photogenic little thing!)

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And then...

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...this interesting fella showed up. He had tiny curly ears and an almost human-like profile, like a Buddha statue.

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I named him Potato and decided that if he was in a samurai movie, he'd be a wandering monk.

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And just like Rosie and Zatanna, Potato seemed to have a mirror double as well, because another tomcat did his first appearing act three days later.

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The tomcats seemed to have something of an uneasy truce, although I never saw them closer together than this. At least they weren't fighting.

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Poor Dear's injury was healing and he was still doing his Batman routine.

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This new boy looked like he was wearing a cape...

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...and since he'd shown up so mysteriously in his dapper tuxedo...

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...I decided he was a former student of Magical Mr. Mistofelees and called him The Majestical Mr. Tux. :biggrin: And yes, I always said the full name when I was talking about him. To borrow yet more from T.S. Eliot, "the naming of cats is a serious matter"!

Next time: more time-lapse photography of Rosie, and a blizzard hits the city! The kitties are largely unbothered.
 

Avery

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Wow! I just read through your postings and photos from start to finish. Such a good story! It sounds like they have a pretty good life. So lucky to have supportive and friendly neighbors, including that nice person who leaves the basement window open! These cats seem to have figured out how to live in your area, which I would guess sees all the seasons. Do you think any of them have been spayed/neutered? Is there a chance that could happen?
 
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Skippyandjif

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Thank you Maria Bayote Maria Bayote and Avery Avery !

I know there have been a few kitties from the feral colony that became acclimated to people and have been spayed (they were all girls) and actually adopted-- most of them are far too people-shy to catch, unfortunately.

If I had the funds I'd try and set up some humane traps to see if I could catch any to bring them in for TNR, though. In the meantime, now that I'm no longer in grad school and I have a little more free time, I'm going to start looking into contacting some feral cat allied groups in Brooklyn to see if they can help!
 

Avery

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That sounds great! You probably already know ways to track down these groups, but I Googled "Brooklyn feral cat rescue" and found a few possibilities, including Brooklyn Animal Action. The NYC Feral Cat Initiative has a page with a list of TNR groups all over the NY area: New York City Area TNR Organizations

Keep up the good work and we'll look forward to your graphic novels about the roofcats of Bensonhurst!!
 

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Loving your photos and the storyline! Grayson - I cannot wait to lay eyes on Grayson!
 
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