It seems there is no end to the simularities! Our cat came from the shelter with the name Jonah as well. We decided the name fit and let him keep it.
His story is a quite unique.
He was found as a newborn kitten in a ditch with Rats trying to eat him. The S.P.C.A. took him to the vets, they stapled up his wounds and a lady hand fed him until they found a mother cat to take him in.
My youngest daughter’s kitten died and she really wanted another. We went to a vets and found this scrawny black kitten mewing in a cage. We opened the cage and he jumped on my shoulder as if to say. “THANK GOODNESS YOU SHOWED UP!! CAN WE GO NOW?”
He is now a huge, dedicated hunter of rats. I suspect is is something personal.
When we first got our Multi-poo, The cat thought it was a small rabit and took it upon himself to remove the vermin from our home. More than once we found the tiny pup pinned by the cat in a death grip. As the dog grew the cat decided he was more fun alive and they became buddies chasing each other around the house.
For me I think the strange part is that usually Dogs hunt cats and cats hunt rats, but in our case, the cat was almost killed by a rat and the dog was almost killed by a cat!
On 2003-02-21 17:15, Redwolf wrote:
Oh, by the way, I did put some plastic grocery bags on my mirrors, and the bird has apparently decided that he “won” the battle, so now, hopefully, he can settle down to making lots of little Juncos! >
Yaaaayy! Baby juncos! What fun! We live in deepest, darkest suburbia (dark in the figurative sense, not the literal), but we still do get some pretty good wildlife. We have lots of deer, including some we recognize from year to year, often more bunnies than squirrels, and once my wife even watched a fox chase something right up to beneath the window she was standing at! Lots of good birds, too – crows, red-tail hawks, and last night an owl!
But the best thing about our little house is that one long side of it is planted with a bunch of trees and shrubs about 10 feet out that arch over to the roofline, creating a perfect little haven for the little birdies. We see lots of fun things in there. And let me tell you, my cat thinks those windows make the BEST kitty TV!!
It would be awful nice to be able to live out in the woods but still close enough to work, friends, etc., but that’s just not very possible around here. The suburbs just go too far out. So we take what we can get and enjoy it (and try to realize that when we plant a tomato plant, we don’t get any tomatoes from it once the deer have eaten it down to a stub).
Hmm, kinda makes you wonder about people who think that the city constitutes the “real world”…
Your Jonah is a black cat too??? So’s ours! When we went to the shelter, he came right up to the front of the cage and started mewing at me…as soon as I picked him up, he started to purr and look at me like he was saying “are we going to go home now?”
Our Jonah likes to play with the rats, but is a fierce hunter of moths. He would love to play with the poodle (Cedar), but as the dog is quite elderly and blind, he’s not as into the whole “play” thing (he does, however, sometimes do a very clever slow motion cat chase!).
I also love living out here ‘in the sticks’. It’s peacful, beautiful, and I can walk down to the river and skip rocks anytime I want… great emotional outlet… priceless!
The only thing that ‘bugs’ me is that last year, out of nowhere, these ‘ladybugs’ or whatever they are… they look identical to ladybugs only they are a sort of dimmed, almost browned red, came out in the thousands. That’s not an exaggeration… I mean THOUSANDS of them all over the house, even got inside the house.
Drones of them flying all about, and to be honest, I’d never even seen this ‘variety’ before last year. Well, winter arrived just in time. They all went to ‘sleep’ and life returned to normal…
Bad… the few warm days we’ve had off and on… I’ve seen a few here and there. Dead, but still coming out of somewhere.
I hate to do it, but I think I’m gonna have to spray. Never seen anything like it. Anyone have a similar experience?
Take care all, and keep enjoying the outdoors, and supporting the life that lives in it. It breaks my heart to even think about what to do about the insect problem!
Whenever serious birders come out to my place I learn about some new species of bird I didn’t know I had around. Last spring I was told there were wood thrush (by the calls).
Every year the Easter Phoebes nest in the garage and “decorate” my car so predictably that I can place an empty dog food bag on my car, under their nighttime roost. They are welcome, indeed, as are all bug-catching birds down near a slow spot in the creek.
The great blue herons are particularly beautiful. Currently, I have an assortment of sparrows, tufted titmice, nuthatches (my favorite), Carolina wrens, flickers, blue jays, downy woodpeckers, goldfinches in their drab winter coats, and (of course) juncos.
The hummers should be back about the first of May. (Spring WILL get here, won’t it?)
Living in the country has also brought the neighbor’s cows into my yard (sloppy hunters left a gate open) and a bit of an interesting aroma when the big dairy spreads manure on the fields.
I’ve talked about the baby snakes in the house in other posts, but the most startling house creature I’ve encountered was when we were living in rural Georgia and we’d get tiny woods scorpions in the house. My then-husband, a Vietnam vet, would pound them into an indistinguishable mass (he’d been stung once by one of the big ones). But the day I found the inch-long Mrs. Scorpion carrying about six perfectly formed miniatures of herself around on her back–well, I couldn’t wipe out a whole family. I scooped them up in a tin can and dumped them off in the woods where they belonged.
Living in the woods (like growing older) is not for sissies.
M
[edited for late-night grammar]
Marguerite
Gettysburg
[ This Message was edited by: mvhplank on 2003-02-21 23:25 ]
