Happy April, Team TNR.

We have met the April Fool…and it is us.

At this point in the annals of TNR at Tabby’s Place, you could say we’ve learned a thing or twenty. We’re veterans in this business of wrangling wild cats, spaying and neutering and ear-tipping and treating them. We know where they hide, we know how to heal their hurts, we know how to get them set for life in caring colonies…

…and sometimes, we need to know that we don’t know a thing.

We forgot that this month, for a moment, but you can’t really blame us. You’d be feeling confident, too, if you’d just caught Peony. This wily little calico (pictured below) was an expert at eluding us. We’d long since trapped, neutered and returned her brother (cousin? father? husband?) Tabby to the little colony where he lived.

Peony, though, was a problem — and she loved it that way. For months, she mocked us, letting us see her while tossing her head in the air at the sight of our traps.

Just when it seemed Peony was utterly un-trappable, the impossible happened: we got her! Now spayed and shored up with vaccines and good medical care, Peony is living the healthy, kitten-free life we’d longed to give her.

And, frankly, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves after that.

So, after bagging Peony, it was small potatoes to evaluate the cats in a new colony. We use a night-vision camera to monitor “our” cats’ activity, and the footage revealed that we were not a moment too soon. One of the cats in this colony was a great, lumbering grey girl, with a bulging belly so ready to “pop” that we could actually see the kittens kicking..Don’t believe me? Check out the video above.

Clearly this was an emergency situation. A mom this pregnant could give birth at any hour, and we knew we had to get to her before the kittens emerged. Mama and her smidgens would have a far, far greater chance at life and health if she gave birth at Tabby’s Place.

Happily, the same expert trapping team that caught Peony was on the case, and they caught Mama with no problem.

Well, just one problem.

Mama was an unneutered male.

There were no kittens in there.

That “kicking” was…well, just some violent gas.

All’s well that ends well, and this big dude has now been neutered and returned. (There’s no such thing as feline Tums, but don’t worry; there’s nothing seriously wrong with his big, busy belly.) The only thing injured in this incident is our pride.

But, then, we do work with that most humbling of all species.

Dear sponsors, thank you for helping the cats to make a merry mockery of us, and helping us to help them even through our own comedies of error. Thanks to you, Peony, Tabby, one obese grey guy, and hundreds of other free-roaming cats are enjoying a happy, healthy spring…and howling with laughter at our humanity!