Cats
Not quite black-and-white
I was thinking about cats the other day. I find some of them quite cuddly and strokeable but if I am honest, I am not their biggest fan. The sign I saw in a shop window in Folkestone the other weekend summed it up. It was one of those joke signs akin to ‘Beware of the dog’ – you know the type. This one said, ‘A cat lives here with several servants.’ I thought that was pretty apt.
I used to have a cat myself when I was eleven. Her name was Twinkles and I got her as a kitten from my then big birding buddy and local neighbour, Cornelious Ravenwing III. Twinkles was a doppelganger of her mother; slender, black and white and likeable. As a kitten she was very playful. I used to routinely have lascerated hands after a bout of boisterous playing with her. Perhaps the best thing about Twinkles was that she used to meet me as I walked home from school. She would wait on our street standing on someone’s wall and then jump into my arms. Sometimes I’d whistle for her as if I were calling a dog and she would appear out of nowhere, delighted to see me.
One day, I came home from school and Twinkles was nowhere to be seen. Wailing, I searched the streets for two days. No sign. I had only had her for six months although it seemed like an eternity. I was heartbroken.
There. That’s my cat story out of the way and I bet you thought I was going to talk about cats killing birds!
I had a black and whit cat when I was a kid, he used to meet me at the end of the street after school and then race me to the house! He was cool. I know cats can kill birds (mine didn't, fortunately), but I still prefer them to the noisy and sometimes hostile intrusiveness of dogs. Hm, hope I'm not starting a cat v dog debate… 🙂
yep! you got me thinking about bird mortality due to cats and I am wondering what is the recorded scarcest/rarest bird ever killed by a whiskered fiend in the uk?
I admit, I was fooled! I thought this would be about cats and birds. I had the perfect cat when I was a kid, a marmalade tomcat named Buzzsaw, who used to follow me everywhere. He did kill birds, and mice, rabbits, muskrats, just about anything–he would always offer the spoils to me and my brother first, and then eat them in front of us after we'd declined. This is probably why I can watch horror movies without flinching today. Now I'm much more of a dog person; I think I never got over it when Buzzsaw died! (P.S., now I firmly believe in keeping cats inside, and would be horrified to view the carnage my cat left behind.)