I sheltered my cat Laney indoors in her early years, but lately I’ve been letting her spend a little time outside.
I’ve always had cats about. When I was a kid, we got our first feline when my father brought home a stray black kitten he rescued from a freeway off-ramp.
That cat, Beau, lived into her 20s despite a leg injury she suffered in a dog attack when she was 3 or 4 years old. That injury paralyzed her lower front limb, and after that, she limped around the house on her elbow.
Laney was also a black stray kitten. I rescued her after she crossed a busy four-lane street just in front of me, narrowly avoiding being smushed by a passing automobile. For three years after that, she was solely a house cat.
A year ago, we moved into a house with a large backyard. I’m not as fundamentally opposed to outdoor cats as some folks. I don’t want Laney out ravishing the local native songbird population, but I can also appreciate the joy she obviously gets padding around outside, hunting.
She has since killed. Her first successful hunt was on a doomed robin chick that had fallen out of its nest well before it was ready to fly. Laney found the not-yet fledged robin in the lawn where something was certain to find it.
I don’t have anything against robins, but they seem to be the worst parents in the bird world. It’s a sad but necessary truth that the young of most wildlife species are born to feed predators. That’s especially so with robins. The website All About Birds reports that robins nest multiple times in a season but only produce chicks about 40% of the time. Also, a mere 25% of fledglings survive to November.
So, my cat will stay indoors for the month or so in the spring when young robins are most vulnerable. I’ll leave the doomed chicks on the grass for the critters that clean up on clumsy robin hatchlings in the spring.
Cue the squirrels.
Yes, squirrels are omnivorous and are the most likely beneficiary of reckless robin protein. There’s a family of squirrels in the big silver maple that looms over my house. They’re noisy and obnoxious, and I don’t care to have them in the yard. I had a plum tree in the backyard of my place in Kalispell, and it was a constant race to beat the fluffy-tailed, ravenous rodents to the ripe fruit.
I’ve no fruit trees now, but I’m considering a bird feeder to keep the cardinals and blue jays around longer in the summer. A feeder will require squirrel-proofing at a minimum. They’re tenacious.
Laney caught and killed a squirrel the other day, which was a mild surprise as she’s a smallish cat. I found her in the yard, with the dog, over a fresh kill. It could have been a hawk that dropped its prey, but I assume it was Laney.
That’s in part because of the behavior I’ve been watching around the old maple. The squirrels come down the trunk within feet of Laney, raising the usual ruckus, enticing her to chase. They act as if it’s a game of tag, which in a way it is. But Laney’s a cat, so her version of the game includes deadly force.
Before her injury, Beau was the greatest hunter I’ve ever known. She used to stay out all night, hunting cottontails on the hillside behind the house. She killed a lot of them. Ate them, too. We’d find the gruesome remains in the yard. Just the bits of entrails she didn’t care for.
I didn’t let Laney eat the squirrel. It’s buried in the yard where a vegetable garden will grow next summer.
The decomposing rodent will nourish the veggies. Hopefully, we’ll beat the surviving squirrels to them.