Cat Trapped Call in the Spelunkers

Venusaur the cat, circled in red, was stuck at the bottom of a deep shaft between two buildings.

For most New Yorkers, the Feb. 8 snowstorm was at worst a mild inconvenience. But one Brooklynite - a Norwegian forest cat named Venusaur - braved the snow while trapped in a deep crevice only two feet wide between two buildings.

He wasn’t found until Valentine’s Day, nearly a week later. And he survived.

It took the help of a Long Island cave-exploring crew to rescue Venusaur, named by his 9-year-old owner, Ryan Fanchiotti, after a Pokémon character.

<>Venusaur, a longhaired black-on-white about 18 months old who lives in Park Slope, on Warren Street near Fourth Avenue, spends much of his time outside exploring the neighborhood. On Feb. 7, he left the house and failed to return. The next day, close to a foot of snow fell on Brooklyn, and Venusaur was missing.

“We had kind of given up,” said Ryan’s mother, Taryn FitzGerald.

Venusaur with his cave-exploring rescuers, Kay Shriver and Rob Fabiano.

It wasn’t until Feb. 13 that a woman around the corner on Fourth Avenue noticed a cat crying out from a deep, narrow shaft between her building and the adjacent one. The next day, she! alerted members of a cave-exploration group she used to belong to - Met Grotto, the New York City chapter of the National Speleological Society.

Within hours, two cavers, Kay Shriver and Rob Fabiano, were making the 90-minute drive from Centerport, equipped with rope, a cable ladder, and belaying devices. They set up the cable ladder from the fire escape, and Ms. Shriver lowered herself into the gap, grabbed the cat, put him in a canvas bag and pulled him up.

“It was very simple once we got there,” Ms. Shriver said. “We just needed to rig the ladder, and it was just a matter of having the right gear. The only thing that was difficult about the whole ordeal was giving the cat back because it was really sweet. He was so thankful to be out of there.”

Ms. Shriver said she believed that the cat had fallen 16 to 20 feet from the first-story roof of an addition at the back of a building into a sunken area at basement level.

he used the phone number scrawled on his collar to contact his owners. Upon Venausaur’s return, Ms. FitzGerald took Venusaur to the vet, who gave him a clean bill of health.

Taryn FitzGerald Venusaur’s owner, Ryan Fanchiotti, made a thank-you card for his rescuers.

“His weight had not dropped too much, so he must have been eating something down there,” Ms. FitzGerald said. She thinks neighbors who heard Venusaur crying must have thrown food to him, and the cat probably drank snowmelt and was kept warm by the heating pipes between the buildings.

Venusaur was known to hop up on the roof of the building addition to visit a dog that sits in a second-floor win! dow of th! e neighboring building. He seemed undaunted by his time in the hole.

“He’s gotten healthy so quickly, and he’s been dying to go outside,” Ms. FitzGerald said Monday. “So this morning, we let him out for a little while.”