FOLIO
When Rebecca Nowicki picked upa nine-day old kitten from Animal Care & Protective Services in March, she didn’t think the brown-and-gray tabby would make it through the night. The kitten screeched with hunger and shivered. When Rebecca put her finger in the kitten’s mouth, it felt like ice, she says. She put the kitten inside her shirt on the ride back to her Avondale home to try to keep him warm. “We stayed up all night with him,” she says. When she called Animal Care in the morning, the staff was surprised. They didn’t think he’d make it either. “He lived?” one asked.
The Nowickis named the tabby kitten Winky. He was the first kitten that the Nowickis fostered. He had been found with a litter of six other kittens and a mama cat. They also fostered the litter and helped to find most of them homes.
Winky, who’s now three months old, was adopted by a classmate of the Nowickis’ 10-year-old daughter Lulu. The girl lives nearby on Richmond Street. Winky shares the Sharp household with a golden retriever named Blondie and is one very happy kitten, according to Sally Sharp. “He is just an extraordinary cat,” she says.
With kitten season at its peak, Animal Care & Protective Services is looking for more families like the Nowickis to join the “Kitten Army,” says foster coordinator Becca Willard. ACPS currently has more than 600 kittens in foster care, with another 20 to 30 new kittens arriving every day, Willard says. Foster families care for newborn kittens until they are old enough to be spayed and neutered, then micro-chipped and adopted. To see the animals in foster care, check out the Jacksonville Foster Pet Showcase page on Facebook.
The Nowickis decided to join the Foster Army after Lulu suffered a broken femur during a horseback riding competition on March 14. Lulu required immediate surgery and faced a long, painful convalescence. A family that the Nowickis stayed with in Tampa while Lulu had surgery were fostering kittens and Lulu asked her mother if they could foster kittens, too. Rebecca thought caring for kittens — with the assistance of her two younger sisters and older brother — might help Lulu weather the ordeal.
“At that point I would have said yes to anything,” she says.
While Lulu convalesced, first in a wheelchair, and then, as she says, “crutching around,” caring for Winky and the other kittens kept her spirits up. “It made it [my recovery] not so boring as it might have been,” says Lulu. “And watching the kittens is funny,” adds sister Cecilia, 8.
In addition to providing care, Rebecca has made it her mission to try to find homes for the kittens the family fosters. They are currently caring for nine kittens, a mama cat and an eight-week old puppy called Mason. Neighborhood children are eager to visit the animals. “We’ve become a destination,” says Rebecca Nowicki, laughing. She also carts the kittens and Mason to pick up children for play dates, to her son John’s baseball games, as well as out to the barn where the family boards their horses. There’s always kids around who want to hold a kitten or a puppy, she explains. Or as the father of one of her children’s friends commented, “I know what you’re doing, Devil.”
Nowicki says the family will keep fostering kittens, especially during kitten season, which dovetails nicely with summer vacation.
“I grew up on a farm,” said Nowicki. “We had kittens and lots of other animals, and I was kind of sad my children didn’t have that experience and that responsibility. Fostering kittens is like the best of both worlds. They are getting that little bit of farm life in the city.”
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