Kittens younger than three or four weeks require round-the-clock care. (Courtesy of the Animal Welfare League of Arlington)

A neonatal kitten nursery is opening in Arlington next month, the region’s first standalone facility dedicated to saving extremely young cats.

Each month during the summer, the Animal Welfare League of Arlington receives somewhere between 20 and 30 teeny, tiny kittens, orphaned at an age when they haven’t yet learned to care for themselves. The AWLA tries to save them all, calling on volunteers and staff who are trained in the round-the-clock feeding that each kitten needs.

On rare occasions, though, they can’t. The kittens might come in too late at night to find a trained foster parent, for example, and the staff knows that a kitten under three weeks won’t last through the night.

“We don’t want them to just starve or suffer, so the most humane thing to do is to humanely euthanize,” says spokeswoman Chelsea Lindsey. “But this is a much better option—it’s just an expensive one.”

So when a local couple offered a major financial donation, the staff knew exactly what they would use it for: kitten-size incubators, nebulizers, and other special equipment that will be nestled in two currently unused rooms at their intake center in Shirlington. The rooms are being covered with paint that won’t be toxic for the fragile creatures.

Such specialized nurseries have been popping up in recent years around the country, with similar facilities in Los Angeles and New York, as shelters work to reduce kill rates, particularly during what is known as “kitten season.”

Between May and September, young cats turn up en masse at already full shelters. Those younger than five weeks need intensive care, including feedings every hour or two and stimulation to go to the bathroom.

AWLA is offering a workshop to train more volunteers in the delicate art of caring for young kittens. It has already filled up, but they are working on either getting a bigger space for the June 14 event or holding a second training.

“Our goal is to have a team of trained fosters who are on-call to come in for this kind of situation during the summer months,” Lindsey says.