As the days get longer, temperatures warm up, flowers start to bloom and animal rescues and shelters in Butler County prepare for another annual sign of spring – kitten season.

Beginning in March and April, mother cats who became pregnant during the winter begin having litters of kittens at higher rates than other times of year, keeping animal advocates busy throughout the spring and summer.

“It hasn’t actually gone into full bloom yet, but we’ve had kittens all year,” said Sean LaFever, founder of Sunshine Farm Cat Rescue in Slippery Rock. “Right around this time, in March-April, is when the moms are finally starting to have their babies. We haven’t had a ton of phone calls for newborn kittens yet, but I’m guessing that it’s going to start coming around the next couple of weeks.”

Kitten season tends to correspond with the start of warmer weather, he explained. Cats are able to travel more easily without snow. However, mother cats can have kittens multiple times in a single year, and cats born in the early spring may already be able to become pregnant themselves by the fall.

“Unfortunately, it never ends,” he said. “Once you have a litter of kittens, once they hit 6 weeks old, the mom can go into heat again, and can technically get pregnant again in the summer.”

At the Butler County Humane Society, lead kennel technician Jill Hall said some kittens even continued coming in over this past winter.

“There’s really only a few months of the year when you see very few kittens. The really cold winter months are when it really tends to slow down,” she said. “During this winter, we always had some stragglers. It wasn’t a big influx, but there was always a steady stream, where we would get calls of somebody having kittens that was not at a typical time of year.”

Hall cites the COVID-19 pandemic as a possible contributor to increasing numbers of kittens.

“A lot of vets got backed up with surgeries, so people weren’t able to get their pets spayed and neutered, and it really caused a snowball effect,” she added.

For anyone interested in adopting one of the many kittens born during the spring season, Hall recommends making sure to provide kittens with toys, scratching posts, and other items to keep them entertained.

“Cats all have their own personality,” Hall said. “Some are very affectionate, some are a little shier, and it’s just (about) finding the right ones.”

She added that adult cats can also make great pets.

“Kittens definitely go faster than our adult cats,” she said. “We still have people who come in specifically wanting adult cats, but the kittens definitely go faster. The problem with that is that when you do have the constant influx of kittens, the adult cats get overlooked.”

As the kitten season continues, the humane society also runs through a lot of supplies used to care for the kittens, she said, and can always use donations.

“We go through a lot of kitten chow, canned food, litter, all of those kinds of things,” she said. “If people are looking for ways to help, we’re always happy to take donations of the things we need to take care of the center. They can always bring it directly here; if they come in while we are open, they can come inside and drop it off.”

The humane society is at 1015 Evans City Road, Connoquenessing Township.

Sunshine Farm Cat Rescue is a foster-based program, and assists with feral cat colonies across the county, LaFever said. The organization was founded in 2019.

“We’re dealing with a 30-cat project over in West Sunbury,” he said. “We ended up getting 18 cats out of there, and 12 of them were female. We just started a Trap Neuter Return program up here — we assist people with feral colonies in getting all their animals spayed and neutered to try and limit the amount of kittens we have coming in as it is.”

Fostering kittens is also an important part of the county humane society’s work, especially with kittens who are 4 to 6 weeks old, referred to as “bottle babies.”

“There’s a lot of involvement with caring for bottle baby kittens,” Hall said. “That’s the age they would be nursing from mom and really are unable to eat any food on their own. Those kittens do require round the clock care. They need to be fed typically every two hours — they’re very fragile at that age as well. Their best chance of survival really is with the mom, but if something has happened to mom, they can’t survive without someone to care for them round the clock.”

The humane society also works to hold spay and neuter days for both feral and domestic cats.

“Animal Friends brings their mobile unit here. Sometimes it’s once a month, sometimes it’s twice a month,” she said. “They will have specific feral-only days, where it is truly the feral cats that need to be trapped, but even if it is a friendly neighborhood stray, people can bring them in as well. We schedule them until they are full, and then we have the regular spay/neuter clinics here, and can refer them to the spay/neuter clinic at Allison Park.”

LaFever advised county residents to use caution if they encounter a litter of kittens in their yard or near their home.

“The best bet is kind of to leave them alone, especially if the mom is still there. Kittens aren’t going to survive without the mother, and a lot of times, especially with ferals, mom isn’t going to come around if people are looking at the kittens,” he explained. “You may think they are abandoned, but mom is waiting for the people to move ‘til she can come back.”

Litters of kittens are often found in dark, secluded spots, like under a house or shed, he said.

“It’s kind of built into their genetics,” LaFever explained. “Anytime we bring a pregnant mom in, we set up what we call nesting boxes, which are like a carrier with a door off it, something that only has one entrance and is secluded. They have a tendency of wanting to have babies as far away from the visibility as they can. They tend to have them under porches, under houses, under sheds, in the shed, somewhere that isn’t really visible.”

While litters of kittens spotted by humans aren’t always abandoned, kitten abandonment, especially by younger mother cats, isn’t unheard of, he said.

“If you end up finding a bunch of kittens sitting in the middle of a yard, that’s not a good thing,” he said. “You get these young mothers, these first time mothers, and they don’t have that maternity instinct fully developed yet, so they have no idea what to do with the kittens. I ran into a lot of them last year that were very young mothers, 5 to 6 months old, and they basically abandoned the kittens. They never fed them.”

LaFever emphasized that keeping too close of a watch on a litter of kittens may not be the best idea.

“People just need to make sure they don’t just sit out there to watch the kittens, because the mom is not going to come back (if they do),” he said. “See if there is maybe a cat hanging around the back of the yard looking at you — if you see that cat on your back porch near where the kittens are, 10 to 1 (chance) that is the mother.”