Last Updated on May 31, 2026 by admin
Kitty Kat Haven & Rescue, in Alabaster, Alabama, did not initially believe the number. They had been told there were maybe twenty cats in the back shed of a property south of Birmingham. By Saturday afternoon they were at ninety-one.
The forty-fourth cat the volunteer ladder team brought down from the open rafters of the corrugated aluminum shed — which had electricity and a single hose-spigot but no ceiling — was a ginger half-grown kitten with a single white whisker over her right eye and a habit of biting the index finger of whoever was holding her. The intake coordinator, Jolene Tilden, named her Saffron after twelve seconds of consideration on the loading-dock clipboard, because Saffron, in Jolene’s expert opinion, is the kind of name a small biting orange thing earns.
The Alabaster Property
The shed sat behind the main house on roughly two acres of pine. The owner had moved out three months earlier and had been, neighbors said, intending to come back for the cats. Kitty Kat Haven & Rescue stepped in after a routine welfare check on the property by a county officer revealed roughly thirty cats living in the rafters, twenty-some on the floor, and a smaller, harder-to-count group inside the partially collapsed crawl space under the main house.
By Saturday they had ninety-one. By Sunday they had had to expand intake into a thirty-eight-household foster network spanning three counties.
Saffron, the Forty-Fourth
She was, the volunteer who brought her down said, the loudest of the rafter group. She had — at six months and roughly four pounds — a vocabulary of approximately three distinct chirps and one full-grown adult yowl. She used all of them as she rode down the ladder in a soft mesh kitten-pouch around the neck of the climber, a sixty-three-year-old retired firefighter named Russell Beaudine who had volunteered specifically for the ladder rotation because, he said, he had been getting bored at home.
Saffron is now in the foster home of a thirty-year-old elementary-school music teacher named Inez Quirós in Pelham, Alabama, who already has two cats, a one-year-old named Bibliotek and an eleven-year-old named Mister Marbles, both of whom have been allowed to inspect Saffron through a baby gate and have so far rendered cautiously approving verdicts.
The Foster Network
Thirty-eight households across Shelby, Jefferson, and Tuscaloosa counties have, between them, absorbed all ninety-one cats. A spreadsheet maintained by Jolene Tilden, color-coded by intake date and medical status, has been updated forty-seven times in the past nine days. The shelter is now booked for spay/neuter clinics through the end of July. Adoption events are being scheduled across all three counties starting in June.
What the Foster Coordinator Wants You to Know
Jolene Tilden, who has been doing this work for nineteen years, said this to a local reporter on the third day of intake: “You don’t need experience to foster. You need a closed door and an opinion about a cat.” She also said: “Anyone who tells you nobody adopts the orange ones has never met an orange one.”
Saffron, the volunteers will tell you, is a small biting orange thing with three chirps and a yowl. She has, in the past five days, learned to identify the sound of a can opener at twenty paces. She is making a strong case for the Quirós household, full-time.
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