There are colonies full of feral felines prowling DeKalb County.

Although the exact numbers of feral cats are unknown, animal control personnel say the cats are especially rampant in DeKalb.

“There are a couple different classes of wild cats in the area,” said Beth Drake, executive director of TAILS Humane Society in DeKalb. “There are the fully feral cats – wild animals who are terrified of humans; there are the in-betweens, which were probably owned cats at one point; and there are owned cats who are allowed outside.”

Jane Kosek is the founder of Fixin’ Feral Felines, a DeKalb-based organization that has trapped, spayed and neutered and released 900 cats in the past three years – 600 of them from DeKalb.

“There’s definitely a feral cat problem in DeKalb,” Kosek said. “What we do is trap them when we get a call, spay or neuter them, and release the feral ones back into the wild. Shelters won’t deal with feral cats, but we will take the kittens to the shelter so they can be prepared for adoption.”

To darken matters, DeKalb is currently in the grip of “Kitty Season,” a term used by Drake and Kosek to describe the April-through-November period when cats are the most active sexually.

A female cat can reach sexual maturity in just four to six months. After that, she will produce two litters a year, each containing four to six kittens.

“Most of the time, the litters we see contain six kittens. The problem here is that any ‘unfixed’ cat can interact with these females,” Drake said. “Even the inside-outside house cats are contributing to the problem.”

Lynn Cundiff owns and operates the other DeKalb area nonprofit feral cat control business, Safari.

“I started this after I realized what a problem it was,” Cundiff said. “I was at Fatty’s with my husband and we looked outside and there were about 15 cats hanging around the dumpster there.”

Cats released into the wild by their owners will not always become wild.

“Some of these cats are released into the wild by their owners who think they can make it in the wild. Most of them can’t,” Kosek said. “These cats will run to a colony as a means of survival, but they aren’t always accepted there.”

Roberta Shoaf, an employee for the DeKalb County Animal Control Agency, has done work with feral cats.

“We have to turn away cats that people are trying to give to us due to space availability very often,” Shoaf said. “I think a lot of these cats are released because people don’t have anywhere to put them anymore; like a student moving back home for the summer or someone moving into an apartment where they can’t keep cats.”

There’s one thing that happens every year: At each semester’s end, there is a sudden spike in the feral cat population, according to Kosek, Shoaf and Cundiff.

“We’re all hoping for student and university cooperation with this, in order to help resolve this problem. The heaviest concentrations of colonies surround the campus,” Cundiff said.

“These populations happen a lot around NIU, within a week of semester’s end, the population jumps. Just last summer, we caught three in the vicinity of NIU’s campus,” Kosek said.

This year, Kosek’s Fixin’ Feral Felines has trapped and neutered 250 plus cats; 77 of them were in DeKalb, as opposed to the 32 from Sycamore and 34 from Genoa.