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Photograph by Jeff Kearns
This mystery tabby found its way 50 feet up into a tree on Nightingale Avenue in Sunnyvale last week and was stuck there for three days.
Diligent compassion saves cat
Neighbor hectors city into sending out tree-climber
By Sam Scott
If only everybody had someone who went to such lengths to help out in a pinch.
Two Saturdays ago, the sight of crows circling a neighbor's redwood tree brought Daryl Milanowski's attention to a cat stuck 50 feet above the ground. Milanowski, an animal lover who says she used to take her cancer-stricken dog to work and can't pass a stray dog without trying to help, couldn't get the animal out of her mind.
Three days later, the cat was still up the tree, and its loud meows were so disturbing to Milanowski that she took a day off from work and sprang into action.
"It's hard to sit here and watch him," she says, eyeing the cat through binoculars from the yard next door to her house. "It's inhumane to see him suffering up there."
John McCambridge, whose yard forms Milanowski's lookout, says he doesn't feel quite the concern of his neighbor. "My wife is more concerned about it than me," McCambridge says.
Milanowski is not a woman to do things by half. When her son was a Boy Scout, Milanowski got more involved than he did. "He told me he had a Boy Scout for a mother," she says. So when it came to saving the cat in the tree, the Sunnyvale resident called everyone from local TV stations to the power company to the Humane Society to the Fire Department to tree trimmers.
Photograph by Jeff Kearns
Daryl Milanowski worked the phones for days trying to find someone to
climb a tree in her neighborhood to rescue a stray cat.
Finding someone to clamber up the tree--which abuts power lines and a cactus--presents a small challenge. Contrary to popular notion, fire departments don't list cat-rescue among their responsibilities, and neither does anybody else. In fact, Sunnyvale Public Safety considers it against regulations. A Public Safety representative says the danger and liability of even a 10-foot climb make such actions unattractive and expensive.
And even unnecessary.
"Public Safety told me that when it gets hungry, it will come down," Milanowski says.
Fearing that the inevitable trip down would be powered by gravity alone, Milanowski kept trying to find people to help. In the end, the city, worried that Milanowski's urgings would result in someone's getting hurt, sent Rich Molina, a worker for the city, to the rescue.
"I climb trees for a living so it was no big deal," he says. Molina spends his days tending the city's trees and often climbs them for pruning.
Molina is also a big animal lover. He has three dogs and a stray cat. He has found homes for two dogs this year. He says working outside all day has given him innumerable opportunities to help stray dogs return home.
"I would have done it as a volunteer," Molina says. He says his hope now is that someone will adopt the untagged cat, which was taken to the Humane Society after its rescue.
Milanowski was delighted. "We're all exhausted," she said after Molina completed his rescue.
"I hope this builds awareness for people to put ID on animals in case something like this happens. So many animals get put to death [in the pound]," Molina says.
That's an unlikely fate for this cat. Milanowski says one of the neighbors will adopt it--even if she has to call them a few times.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
