When cats get stuck in trees, these Triangle arborists make the climb

While he’s dangling from a rope, a dizzying 50 feet above the ground, Chip Hildreth keeps this cat-catching strategy in mind: Get above it first, and maybe flash the feline a few blinks to gain its trust.

He’ll then stick his arm through a pillow case he’s carrying to form a claw through the cloth and use his covered hand to grasp the scruff of the animal’s neck. Flip the pillow case back, tie it off, and descend. Like clockwork, usually.

After two heart attacks, Hildreth, 62, says he’s phasing out of his career as an arborist in Orange County. But as for his side-hustle ascending trees to rescue stranded local cats?

“I’ll probably keep doing that as long as I can still get off the ground,” he said.

Images of firefighters scaling ladders to retrieve stuck kitties are antiquated. The city of Raleigh says neither its fire nor animal control units respond to these incidents, and Cary’s fire department said it made three animal rescues in all of 2022, species not specified.

But for a network of arborists across the Triangle, saving cats from treetops is a monthly, if not weekly, occurrence.

“I’ve done close to 200, I don’t know exactly how many,” said Hildreth, who made his first save in 2006. His wife, Nora Bryan, also an arborist, started doing her own rescues after meeting her husband. The key to a successful climb, she pointed out, is having a confident demeanor — and a sturdy pillow case.

“They seem to know a cat person when a cat person comes up the tree,” she said. “I’ve had a couple of cats that purred the whole way down. I could hear them just like motors in the bag.”

A network of climbers

“Cats are incredibly durable in bad conditions,” Hildreth pointed out, recalling one who spent 27 days in a tree before he brought it down to its grateful owner.

He and his wife charge for their services, but others in the Triangle just ask for donations. Patrick Brandt of Mebane is one of the latter. An arborist who leads projects for UNC-Chapel Hill PhD students, he maintains a website called Rescue My Cat with a dozen contacts for private rescuers across the state. If he can’t make a rescue, he tends to know someone who can.

“Originally, I was looking for excuses to climb trees,” Brandt said. “Back when I first put the website up, I was living in a suburban housing development and didn’t have any trees on my property.”

But quickly, he started getting “plenty of calls” and realized not only that he could get his climbing fix, but also that he would need to find other climbers willing to handle the workload.

Brandt said indoor cats tend to be more appreciative, responding eagerly to his arrival. Yet he’s also endured “nasty bites” from skittish ones since he made his first save in 2012. It was a male named Tucker near Greensboro. Since then, he calculates he’s secured 280 some-odd cats, including one in early December who got trapped in downtown Durham. It wasn’t the first time that cat had gotten stuck, Brandt said.

A Triangle treetop film

For the well being of trees, climbers tend to eschew spiked boots for more minimal climbing equipment.

The first step is to throw a lightweight line over a thick part of the tree above where the feline sits. To get the line up high, climbers affix a weighted ball or bag to one end and either hurl it skyward or use a slingshot. They then attach the lightweight line to a climbing line, run that through their harnesses, don a helmet (and perhaps a GoPro camera), and begin.

“I remember a few where I went up the tree and just waited,” Bryan said. “They just came to me and sat on my lap. I pet them, let them get all comfy and happy again before I bag ‘em.”

This year, Triangle-area treetop cat rescues were the subject of a short film by the Durham-based documentarian Kim Best. Using Brandt as the protagonist, she entered “Please Rescue Me” into this year’s New York Cat Film Festival (a real thing), and it was accepted. The film played at Durham’s Carolina Theater a few months ago as part of a nationwide festival tour.

“I learned that in this very divisive world of ours, that there’s some things that people can agree upon,” Best said. “And in terms of people who love their pets, and in this case, their cats, there’s a meeting of minds.”

Best knows everyone can get behind cats — as long as someone makes the climb.