# When a Colony Caretaker Stops: The Handover Nobody Plans

Almost nobody leaves this work on schedule.

The version people picture is a caretaker who announces in March that they are stepping back in June, with a tidy three months to hand things over. What actually happens is a knee surgery, a job in another county, a parent who needs moving in, or a quiet burnout that becomes visible only when someone stops answering. The colony finds out when the cats do.

That is the problem worth solving, and it is solvable, but not on the day it happens.

## What actually lives in one person’s head

Make this list for every colony you cover and you have done most of the work:

– **Which cats are there, and which are already fixed.** An ear tip is visible. A cat who is fixed but has not been seen in three weeks is not.
– **Where the feeding stations actually are.** Not the street. The gap behind the second dumpster, the one you reach from the alley side after six because the lot gate locks.
– **Who else feeds there.** There is almost always someone else feeding there, and they are often the only person the cats are not afraid of.
– **Which neighbors are fine and which one calls the county.** This single fact can take a new caretaker a year to learn and one bad afternoon to learn badly.
– **Where the key, the code, or the permission came from.** Access is usually a person saying yes once, verbally, years ago, to someone who is now leaving.
– **Which cat is the one to watch.** Every colony has one. The limper, the one who vanishes in cold snaps, the pregnant one nobody has caught yet.

Read that list again and notice how little of it is written anywhere.

## Do the handover before you need it

The fix is not a document. Documents get written once, go stale, and live in the account of the person who left.

**Name a second person per colony, now.** Not a volunteer list. One named human per site who has physically walked it with you at least once. If you cannot name one for a colony, that colony is one bad week from being unmanaged, and you have just identified your actual priority.

**Have them do it once with you watching, then once alone.** Reading about the gate code is not the same as standing at the gate at six in the morning in the dark.

**Write the access down the day you get it.** Who said yes, when, and whether anyone else at that business knows they said yes. Permission that exists only between two people disappears when either one leaves.

## When it happens suddenly anyway

Sometimes it does. Triage in this order:

1. **Feeding and water, today.** Everything else can wait a week. This cannot.
2. **Find out who else was feeding.** Ask the neighbors before you assume nobody was.
3. **Reconstruct the fixed list before you trap.** Trapping already-fixed cats burns clinic slots you may not get again this season.
4. **Re-confirm access in your own name.** Do not keep using permission granted to somebody who is gone. That is how a colony loses a site permanently.

## The honest reason to do this early

A caretaker leaving is not a crisis. A caretaker leaving *with the only copy* is a crisis, and the difference between the two is a few hours of work done at any point in the preceding years.

It also makes leaving survivable as a choice. People stay too long partly because they can feel that nobody else can pick it up, and being irreplaceable is a heavy thing to carry into a decision about your own health.

That is what a shared record is actually for: colony history, cat-level fixed status, feeding logs and site notes in one place that belongs to the rescue rather than to a phone. Purralytics keeps that, free for your first three colonies, so the handover is a conversation instead of an excavation.

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*Purralytics is colony-management software built by a working TNR rescue, for TNR rescues. The free tier covers colony records, cat profiles, and caretaker check-ins.*