Today, our cats became CATS. They’ve been catching mice all afternoon. Each of them caught at least 4 or 5 mice, after we broke up a mice colony in our garden (aka an old hay pile). Finally…
I kept watching them all summer, unsure of how to react to mice. I even brought them mice, which they ate, but I wasn’t sure they’d figure out they need to catch the little critters for themselves. Now I know they can be real cats. Thank goodness!
The best part of all — or as my wife would put it, the worst part of all — is they’ve been presenting their kills to us by leaving them on our front door. I think that’s awfully sweet of them. I’ve been praising them and kicking the mice away nonetheless. I hope they get the message.
In their effort to control flooding, the Japanese have dammed up their rivers. But that move shut out giant salamanders from their natural breeding places and have made it impossible for them to get upstream. Scientists in Japan have worked out a way to allow their legendary giant salamander to get around dams, through elaborate staircases and small waterfalls that preserve the salamander’s natural surroundings. Now they hope the species will thrive in the wild once more.
Updated 10/22/10: You can see better photos of Felix here.
In the summer of 2006, we visited family in Romania, and we met this wonderful white tomcat at my mother-in-law’s place in Tulcea, Romania. He was still a kitten, a growing boy, scruffy, dirty, and completely adorable. He was also deaf as a post, the poor thing.
Having been born pure white with blue eyes, that doomed him to a life of silence. He couldn’t hear a thing. Thankfully he’d feel the vibration of the ground as you approached him and turned around, but you couldn’t count on that, so you’d often have to touch him to get his attention and watch your step around him. The price for those eyes was heavy, sure, but get a load of those sparkling sapphires!
My wife and I fell in love with him immediately and thought seriously about adopting him, but there was an overseas trip to think about, and a visit to the US Embassy in Bucharest to arrange for his passage. Then he’d have had to live in an apartment, albeit a nice one, but still, he wouldn’t be outside, in nature. And we’d have had to hide him from the building administration, since pets were no longer allowed in our building. After a lot of consideration, we decided to leave him where he was, and hope for the best.
I still regret that decision. The next year, we found out he’d been run over by a car, right outside the yard. He climbed over the fence, and since he was deaf, didn’t hear it, and splat, his light was put out. At least it was quick, but it didn’t have to be that way. He’d still be alive today if we’d adopted him, condo rules and customs rules be damned. He’d be three years old now, a happy, content, white tomcat.
I also regret not taking better photos of him. The ones that I have are of barely adequate quality. The framing isn’t right, the lighting is poor, I’m not showing him from the best angles, etc. At least I have him on video in all his scruffy glory, playing with my camera strap and playing with a puppy whose photo you can see here.
You can watch the video below or on blip.tv and YouTube. You’ll notice the play between him and the pup gets pretty rough at times; don’t blame me for not stopping it. He could have run away, but he stood his ground and drove the puppy away in the end. That’s one brave little tomcat! Gosh, I miss the little white fluffball!
Although he couldn’t hear and respond to a name, I called him Felix, and this year, when we adopted a little black and white tomcat rejected by his mother, I named it Felix as well, to honor his memory.
This is part eight of a personal carpentry project whose stages were recorded on video: building a cat house for our two kittens. Here are the other parts:
In this post, you’ll see the finished cat house, hear a bit more about the thinking behind the project, and find out my final opinion about what I’ve built. At this point, the cat house is pretty much complete, although a couple of small touches — like a frame around the window and a rubber door at the entrance — still need to be done. This means there will be a part 9 at some point in the near future, likely within the next 1-2 months.
As mentioned in the videos and in one of the first parts, the cat house was built using both leftover and reclaimed wood and thermal insulation. Pretty much everything I used in its construction I already had lying around my yard from ongoing renovations to our home. The only things I bought specifically for it were the two casters, the asphalt roof tiles, and the wood screws, which added up to a cost of 100 RON or about $33.
In the process of replacing our roof tiles, I found a mummified rat. It’s stiff, fairly well preserved, and it’s the second one I found (I threw away the first one out of disgust). It’s probably the combination of the warm and dry air in the attic that kept it like this. I don’t know how old it is. It could be only several years old, or it could be hundreds of years old. (Our house is over 200 years old.) It looks like it’s going to hold together for another several decades, if not more. You may not want to look at the photos if you’re easily disgusted.
Raoul Pop 