Blue Heron Farm Alpacas

This morning, I had to dismantle part of a wall in one of the stalls. You see, four weeks ago Amelia (Earhart) and Cinderella arrived. They're barn kittens, and eventually their job will be to terrorize the mouse population out there. (At the moment, the mice don't really even run and hide when I enter the tack/feed room. They practically stand on their hind legs and wave.)


(That's Cinderella on the left and Amelia on the right.) The minute they arrived it became clear that the stall was a sieve -- not a secure location for small kittens. So I blocked holes with towels and bags of horse bedding. (Amelia was initially the explorer -- hence her name -- but Cinderella is now utterly fearless and curious.)

Yesterday morning, when I went out to feed everyone, the kittens were gone. The stall was empty. I saw where they'd gone under the wall. Disaster. They're probably 12 weeks old by now, but still small enough to be vulnerable to a hawk or an owl -- or a Pyrenees, for that matter. I heard mewing and finally spotted Amelia, all the way up in the hay loft. (Which is reached only by a very scary ladder affixed to the wall which I am definitely too old to climb.) I proceeded with my scheduled horse-training session, utterly distracted, and when we were finished, Camille and I went into the barn on a search and rescue mission and lo and behold! Amelia was in her stall. I quickly plugged her escape route and listened for mewing. There was Cinderella -- on the floor. Naturally, she ran into a space in a wall, but we coaxed her out with food and reunited her with Amelia.

The wall of the stall separating it from the tack room is rough boards nailed to structural beams, but the boards only go up about six feet. The kittens can climb the wall, and I frequently observe one or the other doing a tight-rope walk along the edge of the top board. When I went down to the barn this morning, that's where I found Cinderella, but by the time I got back with their breakfast, she had vanished. Turns out she had gotten herself down inside the wall and was trapped. (Don't know why she couldn't just scale the inside of the wall like she did the outside. . .) After wracking my brain, the only solution I could come up with was to cut through the top boards with my new circular power saw (which is not meant to be used vertically, I believe, but oh well), then rip them out, reach in and rescue. Not a pretty sight. What will they think of next??