Well, two days isn’t that long. When she gets hungry enough is when they get up the nerve to come back down.
Good luck!
“Don’t use the rifle, you might miss…use a shotgun!”
You don’t find cat skeletons in trees.
Grief/Abandonment Syndrome?
That’s because when they become zombies, they just fall out of they tree and lumber away.
Data point: I have seen my cat descend a palm tree trunk by starting off head-down, then using the front claws as a pivot so he swung round and was head-up. There followed an untidy but successful descent.
I’d never seen that manoeuvre before.
No skeletons in trees:
The cat probably weakens and falls. If it survives the fall, it will crawl off and die. Injured cats hide. That’s one of the reasons that a cat will disappear and never come home—it hid somewhere and died.
Also, once dead, crows, ravens and vultures swiftly dispose of the remains.
And a big hawk or eagle would not be adverse to snatching a sufficiently weakened cat from its perch.
Maybe that’s how they discover that, yes, they can climb down backwards? I hope so. Even an accidental discovery of this skill by the pivot method would help her.
I do understand the “wait until they get hungry approach.” It makes sense that desperation leads to courage in such cases. I just wouldn’t want her to remain up there so long that she becomes too weak from dehydration to have the strength to try. The temps are high there.
She’s been a house cat all her life, with nothing taller to climb than a bookcase. The place she’s staying at has provided her with her first taste of the real outdoors. She didn’t elect to climb this tree for fun. We think she got scared into it by something—a large wild animal most likely, or a neighbor’s loose dog.
At least you know where your cat is. The worst thing is when they’re simply missing.
That happened to a friend of mine’s cat one time. 30 feet up in a damn pine tree for 3 days. Another friend was good at climbing trees so he shimmied up to the limb the cat was on and the plan was to drop him down to me on the ground. I didn’t anticipate the consequences of dropping a scared cat, claws first, from 30 feet up, but I caught him with only minor scratches and he walked away unimpressed as cats are wont to do.
Welcome ceileen. The zombie reference is what we call old dead threads that get revived by someone doing a google search on a particular topic, joining to respond to the old dead thread, thus reviving it. Many people will not pay attention to dates of earlier posts and then start commenting or replying to someone that hasn’t been on this site in years and in some cases a decade or more.
Again welcome to the SDMB
If it still up there, about the only way to get it down is to cut the tree down and hope she’s agile enough to avoid injury.
Or do something to make the tree MUCH less attractive. Have no idea what tools you have available - a fire hose might work.