Kittens

First of all, let me apologize for the long absence. We’ve been awful busy out here! I’ll start by sharing on our recent additions to the homestead, as of June 10, we’ve got two little baby barn kittens! We’d been searching for some barn kittens; as I’m sure you can imagine, living in the middle of fields does not bode well for keeping the rodents at bay.

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With our immense knowledge of sexing kittens, we decided that the black and white one was male and the tabby was female. We named the male Korben Dallas and the female Leeloo from a family favorite film. If you know, you know! Just this past Saturday we found out that Korben Dallas is actually a female. Oops. That’s okay, she’s keeping her name! Originally our hope was for one girl, to fix the boy straight away, and leave the girl so that we might be able to get one litter (and then fix them all) since we’ve got so much land that needs mousing. We’ll see if our plan changes! We surely won’t leave both productive.

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Above are all pictures from the kittens’ first week at our property. We kept them in a kennel for the first day and let them out for awhile in the morning and awhile in the evening for their first week. The second week we let them out on their own in the barn for a couple hours at a time. The third week we just left the door open all day long and then put them in the kennel at night to keep them safe from predators. It’s been a few weeks, so I can’t remember if we let them out right away over night at the four week mark, but eventually they were weaned off the safety of the kennel and now they are officially barn cats.

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Above are photos of Korben Dallas and Leeloo from last week. While they still seem like wee babies to me, they are clearly getting bigger when compared to my foot in the week one pic!