The Tabby Triplets

In fall 2018 a new face arrived at my feeding station. It was a small tabby and when I saw it's face I immidiatly thought of Miko when she was just a kiddo herself. I was very sure that this tabby youngster was a kitten of Miko as it was the spitting image of her. Check it out.

This was clearly a Miko "Mini Me" and so I named it Mikro. But then one day I was checking the recordings from the wild life camera and suddenly there was 3 Mikro tabbys!

Either one of the triplets were faster to visit the feedings station or I just never happened to catch more than one at the time on camera. Either way, I was suddenly even more busy with my TNR project.

First in the trap

I catch the first triplet at the end of October. That night I was actually trying to catch an adult female called Sally. I had set the trap with catnip rather than food, because I know she can't resist cat nip. But Sally didn't show up that night.

Instead a small tabby boy enters the trap and starts rolling around in the catnip. He activates the trap and is startled as the gate goes down. He quickly forgets all that as he sees the string and starts playing with that instead. He is trapped, but he is having a blast!

One of his siblings is roaming outside the trap trying to figure out how to join the party! I don't know this at the time, but the kitten outside the trap is his brother. And he stays with the trap untill I get there.

The tappy in the trap is taken to the vet who tells me he is a healthy little boy. He is neutered, ear tattooed and vaccinated. I decide that the name Mikro (micro in Danish) isn't for him as he might grow into a big boy one day. Instead I move around some letters and end up with Mirko. I used to study with a German named Mirko. The vet takes this picture of him while he is sedated.

Double trouble

While Mirko walked into the trap pretty early on, I struggle cathing the last two in the litter. The weather gets worse and that certainly doesn't help. So it takes me more than a month before anything happens again. But then something totally  unexpectetly happens!

I set the trap one afternoon and I wait and wait. Around 9 pm I decide to give up and go down to deactivate the trap.  There I see not one but two cats inside the trap I thought was empty! I'm very lucky that it's the tappy I haven't TNR'ed yet and not one or two I have already neutered.

I've never caught two cats in the same trap before and I was a little worried how it would pan out. But they wouldn't have gotten in there together if they werent comfertable in each others company in the first place. And since they are still young there's plenty of room for both of them in a trap like this. I actually think it's a good thing they went together as they could comfert each other. They stayed very close and very quite. The vet took some pictures again, to try and help me tell them apart. Now Marco is pretty easy to tell apart from the other two, but Nano and Mirko look very much alike on black and white photos. They are all so adorable.

And thus the triplets became my TNR cats number 15, 16 and 17. Their mother Miko got TNR herself this summer, so these tabbies were her last kittens.

Read more about being a community cat caretaker or see how you can make a DIY cat shelter.