The familiar noise rouses Claudia Smith from the comfort of deep sleep. She awakens, turns her head and squints at the clock: 3 a.m. Right on time.

“OK, OK, I’m coming,” she says, but the chorus of forceful mews is persistent, and the choristers are not patient. At 2 weeks old, they have their needs.

Smith disappears but returns shortly with a handful of tiny baby bottles filled with queen’s milk replacement. She picks up the little noisemakers, and one by one their tummies grow large and round.

She returns them to their nest on the warm heating pad. They’ll be good for another three hours, when Smith’s alarm goes off. Then they’ll need another feeding before she packs them up to take with her to her job in the isolation room at the Lawrence Humane Society, where she has dozens of other companion animals to care for as well. She’ll stop to feed these kittens every three hours throughout the day, though. They won’t go to six-hour feedings until they hit 4 weeks of age.

Smith has been fostering animals since she was 10 years old and bottle-fed a calf who had been rescued from a slaughterhouse. She remembers that first feeding well.

“That calf stepped on my foot and cut it with her hoof,” she says, laughing. “I was standing there with one foot in the air, bleeding, and feeding that calf with one of those big glass baby bottles. As soon as she was done, I went and got seven stitches.”

Caring for animals went on to become Smith’s passion in life. She worked for several vets in town before being hired at the shelter in 1998. Since then, time off and sleep have become precious commodities for her. In addition to working 40 hours a week, Smith usually donates an additional 15 to 20 hours each week, partly because of the number of animals the shelter handles and partly because she wants the work done right.

On top of this, Smith is the after-hours on-call person for shelter emergencies, meaning that four or five times a month, long after she’s gone to bed, her phone rings with urgent calls about animals hit by cars or even wildlife emergencies. That job, along with her certification in animal foster care, means Smith never gets to leave her work at the office and often doesn’t get to sleep through the night.

“I take care of everyone,” she says. “Birds, cats, dogs, a husband, a kid — I do them all.”

And indeed, in addition to her own three cats, two dogs and “a litter box in every room but the living room,” her house is filled with many of the hand-held animals who came to the shelter but went unadopted. Among them is a 4-foot iguana whom she nursed back to health after it lost its tail and some toes in a fan blade.

More difficult to attend to are the many animals who have been seriously hurt, often because of acts of cruelty, and need special care to nurse them back to health. Smith successfully rehabilitated one cat who had burns to his face, tail and all four paws.

“Someone purposely threw him into a campfire,” Smith said, “but he eventually got all his fur back except on his tail. He got adopted after that.”

Cases such as this exact a toll on Smith’s personal life.

“I spend more time with the animals than I do with my husband,” she says good-naturedly. “After taking care of everything I need to do, my free time with him is from 11 at night ’til one in the morning.”

Smith’s ability with animals is undeniable. Midge Grinstead, the shelter’s executive director, says Smith is something of a “dog whisperer” when it comes to vicious dogs.

“She’s one of the best out in the field,” Grinstead says. “The dogs just come to her. She’s good at handling them, and she calms them down.”

Whereas most people would hesitate about confronting a vicious dog, Smith shrugs it off as no big deal. “I don’t judge them, and they know it,” she says simply. “They can tell that I know it’s not them. It’s the way they were raised.”

Now that spring has arrived and with it the usual explosion in the kitten population, Smith’s time once again is no longer her own.

“I went from having no kittens on Tuesday to having 13 bottle-feds on Wednesday,” she said of her latest horde of foster animals. “They keep me busy.”

Nevertheless, there’s no job Smith would rather have. She knows that the animals in her care appreciate her, and that’s what makes it worthwhile.

“Even when it’s a bad day, it’s usually a good day,” she says. “So many unwanteds. These guys don’t have anybody. They need someone.”

— Sue Novak is vice president of the board of the Lawrence Humane Society.