There's a reason it's been a while since I've blogged. We've had a bit of a no-win situation arise, and been considering whether or not I should share this story or just move on with something light. It's fermented away for two months now and it's time to let it out.
Over our Christmas holidays, the wife and I headed to the New England region chasing fields of sunflowers to photograph. Amanda has a real passion for them, and it was only thing we managed to miss during our honeymoon in Italy. We were hoping to see the legendary hills of the Tuscany region over-flowing with the floral gold of "Girasole". But the fields had all been literally just harvested; we had missed it by a few days.
Over the Christmas holidays, Amanda had tracked down where the sunflower fields were in the New England, and even had sourced location info from some of the photo groups she follows. The latest images were taken only two days before we left. We arrived mid-morning Saturday to find every last sunflower field was now just flattened stalks. We had missed it - again. Amanda was shattered.
We wandered around Tamworth and the New England for the next few days, and had a bit of fun and sight-seeing. On our way home, we stopped off at Moonbi lookout for a bushwalk amongst the rounded granite tors and we enjoyed the splendid views. We were sitting down to have lunch when three gorgeous little kittens, each as black as coal emerged from the bush around the car park. They were very hungry and very thirsty and shyly appeared from the root buttress of a huge old fig tree. Gently we scooped them up, one by one, and popped them in the back of my ute and gave them a drink of water. I expected they would go berserk, but instead they gratefully curled up together in a cluster of purring little bodies and promptly went to sleep in a ball.
Naturally we christened them "the Moonbi panthers", after the legendary black panthers that - according to local legend - haunt the more remote parts of the Moonbi area. The Moonbi panthers have been known to kill and partially consume the occasional sheep and are well-known for choosing to terrify passing humans who don't seem to have cameras on them.
So here we were, in the middle of the Christmas holidays, with three kittens that were very obviously the remains of a litter that been dumped in the bush. We were up for a challenge, and rang every animal shelter we could find on the web between Tamworth and Newcastle. All of them were closed for the week of the Christmas holidays. Hmmm, that wasn't a part of the original plan. These were very clearly domestic cats and utterly delightful. They'd make someone very happy once they were checked out & vaccinated. So they lived with us for a few days until the shelter in Newcastle re-opened.
The day arrived to drop the kittens off at the shelter. As much as we feared they'd miss out on finding a home and in all likelihood, be destroyed, there was no other option. We'd asked our friends, put ads up on social media, but no-one came forward. We are dog people, and LOVE our wildlife. They simply couldn't live with us. So the sad decision was acted upon. They were just so skinny and dehydrated when we found them, who knows if they would have survived - and it wouldn't be pleasant if they didn't. I am an Ecologist and know full-well if they had survived, they would certainly have wreaked havoc on the local population of native fauna.
The drop-off point was the thing that hit me from left field. It was professional, humane - and very efficient. We popped all three kittens in the one cat carrier (which had water & food provided) and gently locked the door behind them. We had left a note explaining the origin of the kittens on top of the carrier. In the extremely unlikely event they were microchipped, the owner would know how they had managed to travel so far. A sign explained a ranger dropped by every few hours to remove any surrendered animals.
We could hear and see the other animals that people had surrendered. It was heart-breakingly sad. One old gentleman of a "suburban terrier" whined forlornly and we could just glimpse him. We told him he was a good boy, and the sound of his tail hitting the cage came back to us. As we walked away, I looked down at the top-dressed lawn and there were his paw-prints next to his masters' shoe prints. I couldn't help but wonder about his story and how it had come to this, discarded at the very end of his life. I couldn't help but think of our own dogs when a gust of wind blew a mote of dust off the renovated lawn. It landed right in my eye.
