Skippy and Baby

If it were not for the pictures that Laurie sent to me after the rescue, I would never know what Skippy looked like. The best view I had of him was from the ground when he was 30 feet high peeping over the edge of his perch in the middle of a massive union of branches in his Baton Rouge backyard. Once I got in the tree with him, I caught only very brief glimpses of him, mostly his butt, as he tried to get away from me. The picture below shows the only time I saw his head, and that lasted only half a second. I was expecting a stranger-friendly kitty who would be happy to see me, but, instead, Skippy was terrified of me and did his best to keep as much distance between us as possible. I tried to reassure him, but he wasn't having it. Fortunately, he went down instead of up where his rescue could have become a nightmare, but he managed to stay behind the large branches out of my sight. When I approached too closely, even though I was still out of sight, he could not stand it any more and tried to climb head-first straight down the large trunk. Not surprisingly, he fell but landed on the soft ground and ran straight into the house thus ending his one-night stay in the tree. He is fine, and the whole family is very happy to have him safe inside again, but that is not how I wanted or expected this rescue to happen.

As soon as I began to drive away from Skippy's rescue, I got a call from Stephanie whose cat, Baby, was stuck in a tree again. I rescued Baby in Covington once before just over a year ago, and she was such a sweetie that I was happy to go rescue her again. She was in the same tree as before, and she was just as cooperative the second time as the first. In both rescues, she readily walked into the carrier with no reservations. In fact, this second time, she was so anxious to get in the carrier that she practically jumped into it before I could get it in position close to her. Her one-night stay in the tree ended quickly and easily, and she was soon back to her old self again. She helped Stephanie take down the Christmas decorations -- in the ways you would expect a playful cat to help -- until the toll of the tree adventure finally caught up with her, and then she fell asleep on the decorations.