Our cats are killers.
Their most impressive prey are bats.
These are caught in the dark, at speed, and high off the ground.
We quite often get bats in the house. They are very sweet and we are quite fond of them.
They move very quickly and erratically.
Lying in bed, I have tried to follow them in the dark with the light of a torch and it isn’t possible.
They are fast darting little buggers.
Tigger however, is a supreme hunter.
She takes up position on the floor in the doorway, crouched, coiled and ready to spring.
She has cleverly worked out that at this point, the bats need to come down from roof height to fit under the top of the door frame.
This is when Tigger makes her leap, judged to perfection, and at the top of her arc, she stretches out her paw, and seems to just snag the bats with the very tip of one outstretched claw.
We would normally rescue the bats, but to be quite honest they quickly loose their cuteness and appeal, and become leathery, wriggling, wrinkled, evil looking cat food.
Half chewed bats are a common find at breakfast.
Another favourite is a very small grassbird, about the size of a champagne cork with a tail.
Very sweet and with the most melodic song.
The first one we saw we presumed was dead, then Skye noticed that it was still alive.
Unfortunately it was in a cats mouth at the time.
The kids looked to their dad to solve things.
Cats have claws and I discovered that they are mean, shitty, satanic, hissing, screeching little creatures when you try and remove their twitching prey.
Unbelievably, once out (I had to insert my thumb and first finger between the cats incisors. Sore.), the bird flew off unharmed.
I wasn't so lucky, and any adulation from the children was not enough to compensate for the pain inflicted by four sets of claws.
The next time I had a better system.
I was basically a lot more rough and simply threw a towel over the offending feline, sat on it, pinned it down by the neck and got the bird out.
Again alive.
This time I only lost about one pint of blood. And had to deal with the girls shouting, “Don’t hurt Tigger! Don’t hurt Tigger”
However, these are exceptions to the rule. Generally, during dinner, one of the kids says something along the lines of, “Eeughh, gross. There is something dead and bloody under the table”
And generally there is. Blood, guts and all.
Oh, and on the up side, we don’t have mice co-incidently.
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I'm ashamed to admit that I keep forgetting about your blog. Not as often though, as you forget to blog :) But late as it is, I just had to tell you how tickled I am at this post. I thought that I was the only one enduring a super hunter cat, but it seems my Mia has a twin in Africa. Having such a hunting cat builds character (in the human care givers). I'm much tougher now than I was before rescuing Mia from the pound. Waking up in the middle of the night by what you think is the dream trying to scratch its way out of your head, turns out to be a mouse trying to get in has made me much less squeamish. I don't mind carcasses in the morning, but I draw the line at the ripping, smashing, crushing, crunching sounds of cat vs rat in the dark. Now the bedroom door gets closed at night.
ReplyDeleteAnother story entirely, is how cat came 2nd when stacked up against the guinea fowls. Maybe another time.