animal encounters

Yesterday I was taking a nap on the couch, and when I woke I saw our cat Dolores looking very intently out the patio door. Looking up at her was a male Northern Cardinal. He was just standing, looking. Judson noticed that there were small feathers floating around and a few stuck to the center of the glass. We figure that he flew into the window and was stunned. He just stood there for the longest time, opening and closing his beak, then starting to blink more rapidly. It took him over 15 minutes to recover. Most birds (if not killed immediately) can recover from a window strike IF they aren't nabbed by a predator in the meanwhile. We didn't actually see this fellow fly away (or be eaten) because we were distracted by a another animal event.

We feed several feral cats. The golden, long-haired tabby we call Fuzzy. An older gray tabby startled him and he started climbing a tree, and then just kept going, up up up. He climbed at least 35 feet before he started coming down. The tree is wrapped in ivy, which gave him a little more traction. At last he came to the lowest branch, which was still a good 15-20 feet up. He kept turning around to try to figure how to get down. Then he settled into the crook of the branch and watched while 2 more cats chased each other below him. He might have thought, "this is not an opportune time to descend." Judson and I were about to give up on him, wondering if he planned to stay the night, when at last he started down at a kind of angle. He would try to walk forward a bit sideways, then he would slip so he would turn to be upright and move slightly backwards. Then he would turn sideways again so he could move forward down the tree, slip, and right himself. In this way he lowered himself to 8 feet, then jumped to the ground into the bed of ivy.