All-night trapping.

As mentioned in the past, I have several locations where I promised to trap cats that haven't been finished up yet. There is a county property that is one of these. I vowed to myself this week would be the weekend to get that taken care of, so I ran out Friday after work to set some traps.

I ran out again at around 10:00 pm and discovered that the trap was closed and someone had set dry food out in front of it. Hey! Helpful humans! Don't touch my traps!

Good-hearted meddling is often a problem with trapping in an area traveled by humans. This trap has been sitting (without a back door) for a month for the cat to get used to. I'm guessing a staff member saw it set, assumed someone else had "meddled," then closed the trap and left food. They probably didn't realize it was me.

So I reset the trap, removed the dry food (you can the grease marks where it was in this photo) and left my business card under a rock in front of the trap, so Mr. Whoever would know it was me who had re-set the trap.





Four A.M. (groan) I crawled out of bed and drove the 20 miles over to check the trap, and began to curse a bloody streak when I saw ANOTHER pile of dry food in front of the trap, which was once again closed! But as I shone my flashlight around, I saw something was inside the trap.

Apparently Mr. Someone had come along, seen the trap still closed but the dry food (which I had removed) gone, assumed a cat had eaten it, and put more out, not realizing there was actually a cat already in the trap!

Good thing the cat hadn't been a skunk!

As you can see, there are signs on the trap (with my phone numbers on it), and I also trapped after closing when one would assume there wouldn't be too many people around. And this occurred between 10pm and 5am. There appears to be damned good staff security on this place.

This is the cat:



However, the county had reported a lady cat, and this fellow was definitely no lady. So when I went in today and showed them pictures, oh la, it's a different cat. So I still have to continue to trap to catch their lady cat, and this guy need to have a poster drive to see if he has an owner.

The staff said they had put food in front of the trap. They now know I'm trapping all this weekend. Personally I'm glad to have had "meddling" occur. This means staff have been making sure their stray cats are fed. So often people only bother to check once a day...or only a few times a week. Whoever kept putting food out for this cat (between 10pm and 5am? Are you crazy?) obviously looks every time he's near the building. And that's great.

Guess I'll be crawling out of bed at 4:00 am tomorrow, too!

This is an absolutely gorgeous valley to travel through. On the way home today, I caught sight of this goose nesting, and turned around to take a photograph of her. She wasn't so thrilled, as you can see by the defensive posture of her head. I took this on zoom, so as not to disturb her too much.