Phoenix's story really begins with his mother Ollie. While she has a story of her own, what matters here is that she was the omega cat of her colony, besides being extremely timid and deathly scared of humans. Days would go by when she wouldn't be seen eating any of the food put out for the colony by the caretaker (Meredith Weiss, a good friend of mine).
Ollie was one of a litter of four, the last litter of Kukla, the surviving matriarch of two. When Kukla and two of her kittens (Wendy and Duluth) were trapped in April 2001, the commotion allowed Ollie and her sister Fran to evade capture. Fran was finally trapped in October 2001. This left Ollie as the only intact female in the colony. It was imperative as part of the TNR process to catch her and put an end to the "threat" of more kittens, but for one reason or another, the entire winter passed with Ollie remaining at large.
This wasn't completely our fault. There were situational factors in play. Quite significant was that the home base of the colony was a private parking lot to which we had no access. The best we could do in any trapping session was to put traps on the sidewalk and hope. Ollie hardly ever ventured out from the back corners of the lot, so it was pretty clear that to catch her we would have to get into the lot somehow.
Here again, the problem was that this private parking lot actually was on city property. Reading between the lines, the reticence of the car owners was easy to understand. They had made private deals with the city bureaucrats administering the property. As a result, no one wanted to say anything, let alone discuss who might have a key to help us out. It took a long time to establish some kind of relationship. We finally got a big break in March 2002. Someone decided that we were no threat to their private arrangements with city officials; that we were only concerned with the cats.
One Friday in late March, this person let us into the lot. It was late morning, quite possibly the worst time to catch any cats. Even so, we put several traps at the back and, as usual, hoped for the best while waiting outside on the sidewalk. Amazingly, within half an hour we heard the unmistakeable khachung of a trap springing. Even more astonishingly, the cat was Ollie!
This was certainly a stroke of luck. We didn't even have a vet appointment. So we rushed back to Meredith's apartment with Ollie, and Meredith hit the phones. Begging, pleading, she got an appointment at the Humane Society for Sunday, two days hence. Things were definitely going our way.
Meanwhile, there was the issue of putting Ollie back out, after the spay. She was the omega cat, and we were worried about her long term prospects in the colony. It was a very long shot, but perhaps her timid disposition would allow someone sufficiently motivated to socialize her. Well, it was high time for me to get a second cat, so I volunteered. That was the plan until Sunday evening, when we picked up Ollie from the Humane Society. To the question most often asked by feral cat workers, "was she pregnant?", the answer was, "no, she's nursing."
We were in shock. Ollie had never even looked pregnant in the months past; and she had been very subdued in the holding cage leading up to the Sunday appointment. On Monday, Meredith took Ollie to a feral cat specialist (the famous "Dr. G.") who opined that the litter couldn't be more than a couple of weeks old at best.
This was a disaster. Never mind the plan to socialize her, even the standard protocol of holding her for 72 hours after surgery to monitor her recovery was hazardous. At this point, three full days had passed. Holding her for another two days would surely kill the litter. The alternative was to gamble on Ollie's condition, not to mention the reliable skills of the Humane Society's surgeons, and let her go immediately, in case she could save her babies.
It was Meredith's call. Concerned as she was for Ollie, both short-term and long-term, the thought of cold-bloodedly condemning a litter to death by starvation was too much. She let Ollie go late Monday afternoon, barely 24 hours after the surgery. Assuming (not the least for our own peace of mind) that the litter was about two weeks old to have any chance, we still wouldn't know for at least another month whether any had survived our intervention.
In early May, the alternate feeder of the colony, a lady named Paula, called Meredith to say that she had seen Ollie with two kittens! Unfortunately, we couldn't immediately verify the news ourselves. Since the week before we trapped Ollie, we had been involved in the biggest TNR project to date in the US: on Rikers Island, where an estimated 500 cats were to be caught and neutered over the course of the entire summer. It wasn't until June that a break in the Rikers island activities gave us time to attend to the colony again.
We saw only one kitten. We spent a week verifying that there was indeed only one; not two, as Paula had originally reported. And there was a new problem. A calico (whom we called Suki) had shown up and joined the colony. Worse, she was clearly pregnant. So the kitten would have to wait.
We trapped Suki on a Tuesday, and trapped the kitten four days later. It was 12 weeks and a day since we had trapped Ollie. Generally, in TNR work, only kittens under 3 months of age are kept for socialization. This kitten was already over the practical limit, but there was no way we were going to put him back out.
First, if we had really done our job well, we would have caught Ollie the winter before, and he would never have happened. Then, we all but killed him by depriving him of his mother for more than three days when he was an absolute baby. Finally, we could have caught him earlier since we knew of his having survived his infant ordeal. We owed him.
And that is how I came to have Phoenix with me today.