Some­thing a lit­tle bit sur­pris­ing hap­pened last week­end that I briefly twit­tered about, but never got around to writ­ing down.  Kim was fin­ish­ing up some gar­den­ing in the front yard and Nor­man the cat was jump­ing through the grass, dig­ging in the dirt, and just being an ener­getic out­door kitty. 

After I got my stuff put away and cleaned up a bit, I took a yowl­ing Ebenezer out on his leash.  By this point, Nor­man was climb­ing around in the hedge that sep­a­rates our house from the lit­tle apart­ments next door.  Ebenezer was curi­ous about the whole thing and was half in the hedge and half in the dri­ve­way.  All the while, this spar­row was behav­ing in what seemed like an odd way.  It would land on the dri­ve­way, chirp a bit, fly up to a nearby tree, then chirp some more, then land back down on the ground.  I later real­ized it was try­ing to dis­tract the cats and get them to chase him away from the bushes.  There was a sud­den very heavy bush-shaking *rustle*rustle*rustle* from the hedge, then Nor­man shot out and ran to the back­yard.  Ebenezer and I chased him and found he had an ado­les­cent spar­row in his mouth.  He was chew­ing on it, flipped it in the air a few times (once almost hit me in the face), and doing gen­eral cat-having-fun-but-in-torturous-ways sorts of things.  Every­thing said and done, he ate all of it except for one leg and part of a wing.  He con­tin­ued to prowl around that bush.

Later in the same evening, as I was har­vest­ing mint in the side yard, he came zoom­ing by with another bird in his mouth.  It then occurred to me that bird­seed is cheaper than cat food, and if I could get past the moral issues of hav­ing lots of low-hanging bird feed­ers, Nor­man could catch all of his own food.  This thought was dashed at feed­ing time when he yowled for food as if he was starv­ing and hadn’t just imme­di­ately eaten two birds.  (At least, two that I’d per­son­ally wit­nessed — who knows how many more that I did not see?)

Part of me feels bad for the fam­ily of birds that got ter­ror­ized by Nor­man, but really — those birds should know to put their nest up in a high tree, not a bush with branches close enough together for a young cat to climb.

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Tagged as: birds, cats, ebenezer, norman