The weather is warm, the poppies are blooming, it seems like only yesterday that we could breathe air without sneezing, now we cannot breathe it without antihistamines. The blackbirds are chattering their warnings in the back yard, the cats are on the prowl.
Rodent season is here, with it’s daily gift of a small, furry organism in peaceful repose on the terrace behind the house, nothing but its concerned facial expression belying an unpleasant and protracted death.
I say daily mouse, but our daughters are actually getting a good idea of the wide range of local fauna. Various mice and rats. Shrews. Voles. Wild hamsters (aggressive – so aggressive that they prefer to stand in the street and give approaching cars the finger instead of running away. So you can imagine the amount of road kill in a month or two when they start roaming about.)
And, yesterday, a mole.
Gamma was thrilled. “What a cute mole!” Her mother wanted to toss it in the compostable garbage bin, but Gamma strongly protested. So the mole spent a day on our terrace. On its side, taking in the sun.
Moles *are* cute, as long as they’re not messing up your yard. Plump, nearsighted little guys. Ungainly on the surface; not much of a challenge for a cat. I finally took a trowel and tossed him in the garbage last night after Gamma had gone to bed.
Nowadays, the Daily Rodent is not so bad. Our oldest cat, Oliver, used to climb the birch tree outside our window, jump in our upper-story bedroom window (a skylight) and give us live prey. It usually went like this: cat jumps onto roof with a big *thunk*. I try to grab him before he comes in, and carry him back outside with an ill-tempered golden field hamster cussing a blue streak still in his mouth. This usually involved a certain amount of freaking out on my part, which resulted, about half the time, in Oliver opening his mouth to, to I don’t know what – explain, maybe – which the rodent of course used to make a quick escape, which led to another 30 minutes in the middle of the night of me carrying the cat through the house in search of the little animal, putting the cat down in a good spot and sliding furniture around beneath which the prey was thought to be hiding.
Then, our neighbor killed our tree with a copper nail, we had to cut it down, and sleep better at night.
Eh, where was I?
The Daily Rodent nowadays. Yes, anyway, we just check the terrace in the morning before work. The girls are getting good at identifying them. “Look, a… um… that looks like a mouse liver… how nice, he brought us his favorite organ…”
Back when our cats were indoor/outdoor cats they would bring their live (and dead) prey inside also. Once Sam brought a dead mouse inside in the middle of the night and meowed vigorously to wake us up to praise him. We resisted–but when one of us got up in the middle of the night for a nature call the mouse was discovered–Sam had left the corpse right in front of the toilet. Nothing like stubbing one’s toe on a dead mouse in the dark. Another cute trick was bringing live birds inside. Have you any idea how many feathers a bird has? And they all seemed to fall out during the glorious indoor chase and recapture.
Ollie brought a dove pigeon home once, while we were gone, through a cellar window, and chased it upstairs, through several rooms, and then up more stairs, through more rooms, and finally nailed it in the upstairs hall.
We deduced all of this from forensic clues like feather distribution and blood splash patterns.
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Dammit. My computer has gone mad.
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Cripes. What the hell is going on?
My parents’ dog isn’t quite quick enough for most of the animals in their yard, but he does catch the occasional rodent or bunny. The best, though, are the toads he finds at night. When he attacks them, they play dead until they actually are dead. This frustrates him to no end, he’ll often worry over a toad corpse for hours. We also suspect they secrete something through their skin, because after a few minutes of toad-attack, he froths at the mouth.
what, mary, you using opera on a mac or something?
a consequence of living in the tropics. our macho cat likes preying on snakes — and bringing them home… **shudder**