Send in the clowns....

 

Don’t Bother, They’re Here

 

 When Scruff was still outside, from age 3 months to 10 months, the summer of 2019 was the summer of cortile cats. 

Since the weather was nice, I brought trays of food outside for the larger gang to feast upon.  I would sit in the cortile (courtyard) sipping wine until they were done.  After that, the routine at that point, was for the younger kittens to come into the cortile and play.

There was nothing fancy about it.  Harry’s large travel kennel was still out there and we had a couple of towels inside of it for comfort.  The kennel itself sat on top of an old patio chair pad, to keep it from being in direct contact with the cold ceramic tile floor.

For their entertainment, I had a couple of aluminum foil balls and the old chair pad had the ties that were used to fasten it to a chair sticking out.  To kittens, especially feral ones, these constituted toys.

Scruff, Ink and Sib would bat the balls, roll around with the chair ties and tease each other inside and outside of the kennel.  Sometimes Mamma would settle down in the kennel and take a nap.  Once in a while Funky would join in.  Later in the summer, Imp, Tee and Calzini became part of the crowd.

 Once they were inside and past the trauma of living outdoors, past their surgeries and becoming healthy and comfortable in their new surroundings, playtime became a “thing” again.

Aluminum foil balls and string were no longer enough.  My husband found a “bargain” online, a bag full of cat toys.  There were fuzzy balls, cushy balls, sparkly balls, gray fuzzy mice, white fuzzy mice, not so fuzzy rubber ones that looked just a bit too realistic, feather teasers and tunnels.  Everything was a “hit” with the burgeoning indoor crowd, whom I soon dubbed “the clowns.” 

 A pattern began emerging.  It seems the clowns became very frisky when they were hungry.  This meant that every morning, first thing, they were raring to go.  Since my husband tends to get up before I do, I would often awaken to the sound of the thundering herd galloping up and down the  hallway or have      one, two or three of them use me as a launching pad.  Oooofff!!!

The next galumphing galloping sessions tended to coincide with the bedtime suppertime feeding.  This was the opposite of our routine outside, but this certainly made more sense…full tummies meant naps were in order. It made it somewhat easier to insure they would all go to bed, too!!

In fact, playtime is what helped each one of them to assimilate…as we added new clowns to the clown car.  Favorites were identified.  Missy Tee and Percy LOVE the tunnels.  They go inside and I swear they think they are invisible, no matter how much of them might be sticking out somewhere.

Scruff loves his very favorite mousey…a gray one that no longer has a tail.  He loves all the mice, but the sad, beat up gray one is his special one.  He loves them so much he hides them.  Then, of course,he can’t play with them, but then again, neither can anyone else.  

When enough toys “disappear” (that is, they are inaccessible under a dresser or cabinet) my husband fishes them out.  Scruffy gets very excited at this point and starts pacing behind wherever my husband is looking for the lost toys. When little gray mouse appears, he claims it once again, plays for maybe a half an hour, sometimes longer, and hides it again.  He always knows where it is, regardless.

 Lupo likes the one I call the “rat mouse”…the one that looks just a bit too much like a real mouse or a   baby rat.  The fuzzy balls are fun, too, because he can get them stuck on his claws and fling them long  distances, which is especially fun when they land on a counter or table, not so great when they wind up in a water bowl.

Everyone loves the laser pen.  Everyone.  I had 6 out of 7 completely enthralled by the moving light. Lupo figured out where it was coming from, but decided to continue to play along anyway.

Imp plays chase with the others and sometimes chases a ball, but he is smart enough to pace himself so he doesn’t have an asthma attack.

They are all over one year old now, still extremely playful.  Percy is THE most playful and finds new ways to cause mischief.  He has recently decided he doesn’t like the cat cushions we have in some  of the cages nor the one on the cedar chest in the entryway.  He attacks them, pulls them out of the cage or off the chest and wrangles with them for a while until he drags it off somewhere.  It was hilarious to watch him with the rather large one from the cedar chest as he attempted to hop down the hallway with it, one corner in his mouth, the rest of it in the way underneath him, but he was determined to kill it and bring it to his lair, wherever that is.

Now that spring is here at last, some of the wild playtime antics are being replaced by bird and bug watching in the open windows and just plain sunbathing.    The circus clowns are taking a small hiatus for the summer.