Our time living on the North Carolina coast will hit fourteen years this fall. It has been a wonderful adventure. We live on Raymond’s Gut off the impressively wide White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle. I was not a boater when I came to the area, but we bought a 20 feet skiff in June of 2007 and we learned to love our time on the water. I also continued the kayaking that I have been doing since the mid-nineties. I even wore out one kayak by fishing very close by the oyster rocks in the river.
Living on the water, in the marsh has been a life changing event for us. We have lived a lot of different places including along the shore of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia and at Tay Creek in the hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick where we farmed and had 200 head of Angus for ten years. We learned a lot in our sixteen years in Canada but the marsh has been a good education for the later years in life. We have ridden out hurricanes here and seen an amazing amount of wildlife like our Great Egret buddy. Frank 29X who has visited from Canada every winter since 2012. However, we did not expect kittens to be a part of our life here.
About three years ago, I saw a starving kitten wandering the neighborhood. I lured it to our home where we started feeding it. Luckily Smokey had been fixed. A few months pass and a tiny cat shows up and starts enjoying some of the food. We gave her the nickname, Little Cat or LC, for short. Over the months, LC became Elsie and she became a regular. Two springs ago she had kittens. We managed to trap one and someone else got another. Our daughter took the one we caught home and it is living in luxury now instead in the unpredictable marsh. Last summer Elsie had some additional kittens. We tried to hire someone to trap them. We were unsuccessful with them and getting the county involved. We still feed Elsie and her two fully grown cats from last year.
This year Elsie had kittens again. This time she brought them to stay in our garage. We managed to trap three of them quickly but one kept eluding the trap. It took a week to catch the one we decided to call Maverick. The first three kittens were socialized very easily. Maverick has been more of a challenge. He loves to be held but is not fond of being picked up.
Still it turns out that rescuing marsh kittens and sharing videos of their antics is a great way to save your sanity, have fun and get your mind off the COVID-19 crisis. I still work but I make time to play with the kittens every day. It is much more therapeutic than even watching late night television. This is a short kitten video showing how much fun they can dream up. I have decided to post more of them via Twitter. Hopefully, they will make you smile. You can find me at @ocracokewaves on Twitter.
