Bats and cats: Severna Park softball junior Ryleigh Smith carries on a family tradition of helping neighborhood cats

Most Severna Park softball players simply just wake up and catch the bus to school. Ryleigh Smith checks on her cats.

Unbeknownst to most people driving through the white picket, lacrosse-crazed suburbia, there’s a secret society of felines, nestled around seemingly innocuous locations like elementary schools, trails, backyards and driveways.

Smith is a feral trapper by trade, the third in a maternal line. She’s a volunteer with the goal of spaying and neutering wild colonies of kitties to prevent them from growing too large. Even during the busy spring season, the Falcons junior checks on the traps morning and night — sometimes more — and feeds them once a week.

There’s nothing she loves talking about more.

“The younger cats are more sociable and easy to domesticate,” Smith said. “My favorite’s one in Severna Park; he has one eye. He’s not the most friendly, but he’s scraggly and kinda cute looking.”

Her teammates and coach hear about them constantly. Falcons softball coach Bailey Benedick reckons her favorite story is from this past March, when her third baseman regaled her with details on each one of her “cat clans” and how each must have a name to make it “more official.”

“I know they know I’m doing it,” Smith said, “but I don’t think they know how much.”

Erika Smith reckons her daughter was born a future veterinarian. Ryleigh watched the woman she considered her grandmother, Erika’s best friend’s mother, run a massive dog and cat sanctuary while raising exotics, horses, livestock and, of course, feral feline colonies. She passed her knowledge to Erika, Ryleigh said, who then passed it down to her.

“I was so into it. One of my earliest memories is when I was 4 and we went around Baltimore City and Annapolis looking at the colonies and feeding them,” Ryleigh Smith said.

Erika Smith still remembers her 13-year-old daughter walking into her kindergarten classroom with a cat in her hands. Ryleigh couldn’t catch a ride home from school, so the then-freshman walked the Baltimore-Annapolis trail down to her mother’s school when she bare-handed a stray.

“From then on, she was on a mission to catch them all,” Erika Smith said.

The junior currently has roughly 30 cats on her plate. The family keeps watchful eye on colonies living in the two cities still, but the Jones Elementary clan — eight adults and innumerable kittens — belongs to the teenager. She collaborates with neighbors’ backyard colonies. Earning a driver’s license allowed Smith more independence in her work and she developed her own style.

“I prefer tuna to bait them,” Smith said, “even if it smells horrible.”

Smith operates on word-of-mouth — neighbors coming to her or her mother with a cat sighting — and she feeds off Facebook complaints. People even enlist her to trap raccoons and opossums that terrorize local chickens. Sometimes, Smith checks her traps just to find a wayward rabbit hiding inside. She keeps a mental log of where each tends to hide, walking alongside sides of the road with cans in one hand and a plate in the other.

As Smith furthered her craft, curiosity led to more cats. Smith traps, neuters and rereleases those too wild to live indoors. She tries to domesticate some, adopt them out, but one in particular was returned to her (that’s her coach’s favorite). Smith keeps five in the house alone (along with the three dogs, two chinchillas, a hedgehog, a hamster and eight chickens) in a side room. She’s working with her mother to build a shed off their house to shelter more.

And, most importantly, she still invites her mom along.

“I treasure the times we spend together,” Erika Smith said. “It makes my heart happy that at 17, she still chooses me to join her in her adventures.”