As March Madness wraps up and prom season approaches, a third event is sweeping across the country: kitten season. 

“Kitten season is what those of us in the animal welfare community call the period of warmer months when cats are breeding more, so shelters get overrun with all these litters of adorable kittens,” explained Allana Maiden, a coordinator for Richmond Animal League, told WTVR-TV News. 

“And you know, our animal control shelters just aren’t equipped to handle the volume of kittens that are coming in.”

Across the United States, kitten season largely stretches from March to October.  To prepare for the annual uptick in litters, shelters and rescues are finding unique ways to gather resources — and raise awareness in their collective communities. 

In Bozeman, Montana, The Heart of the Valley Animal Shelter threw a “Showering Love on Tiny Paws Kitten Shower” with a kitten “baby registry” full of much-needed items like formula, litter, and medical equipment. 

In Bentonville, Arkansas, Best Friends Animal Society Pet Rescue Center hosted a beginner workshop on how to foster kittens. 

“A shelter is not the best place for a kitten, so Best Friends works with rescues and shelters to take kittens out of shelters so they can be safely raised in foster homes,” a spokesperson for the rescue wrote in a press release. 

Some animal rescues — like Isabel Y. Garcia Animal Shelter in Port Isabel, Texas — are even waiving adoption fees altogether. 

“All the animals we have are free,” Teo Cisneros, a shelter employee, told Port Isabel-South Padre Press. “They come with their rabies shot, are sprayed, neutered, and are microchipped.”

Shelter employees and volunteers also had an urgent message for anyone who encounters a litter of kittens during kitten season: Be patient and see if the mother is nearby. 

“People are kitten-napping kittens that have a mom,” Emilee Johnson, foster coordinator for the Humane Educational Society, told ABC News Channel 9 in Tennessee. 

“That’s a challenge because we’re getting these kittens that would have been okay if they would have stayed where they were,” Johnson added, “and then now we’re trying our best to get them into foster homes and get them cared for when they really need to be with their mother.” 

When it comes to avoiding “kitten-napping,” Johnson suggested that people use “eyes before action” and take a beat before leaping into rescue mode. 

“Are the kittens, you know, fat? Are they clean? Are they quiet?” Johnson asked. “That might mean that the mom just went off to get some food, or, you know, she sees somebody, you know, peeking at her kittens, and so she’s hiding.”

“If you go up to the kittens and they’re filthy, they’re crying excessively, they look skinny at that point, you do need to take them,” Johnson advised, “because it’s most likely that the mom is not coming back.”

Overall, vets and shelter coordinators alike say that the best way to reduce high kitten birth rates — and in turn, lower euthanasia rates in overcrowded shelters — is to spay and neuter your pets. 

In fact, animal rescues across the country often employ “trap, neuter, return” programs to reduce the chaos of kitten season before it even begins. 

“They can have up to three litters a year, and you’re thinking if they have litters, and then their four-month-old kittens have litters, I mean it just exponentially increases super fast,” Sherri Heishman, executive director of nonprofit rescue Cat’s Cradle, told WHSV News Virginia. 

For those looking for a more permanent way to help out during kitten season, prospective pet parents should look into fostering or adopting cats at overcrowded rescues and kill shelters — and that includes aging cats too, not just kittens. 

“With many kittens coming into [our] pet rescue center, the shelter’s long-stay pets need to find the fosters or forever homes they deserve,” HCFL wrote in an Instagram post. 

All of the cats shown throughout this article are currently adoptable through the Hillsborough County’s Pet Resource Center. 

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Header image via Charles Nadeau / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)