This all begins with my cat being a mouser. He’s great at that. Brings them in all the time, and we always toss him and the mouse back outside, and that’s that. He doesn’t bring them back in. He just wants to show us, really.
Of course, there’s the time he let one loose in the bedroom at 3 AM and meowed to let me know. I was trying to find it under a shelf, and he’s on the other side of it, freaking the fuck out, having LITERALLY the best time of his god damned fuzzy life. Best day ever! Dad and I played with a mouse!
For the past four or five weeks, a mated pair of Scrub Jays has been nesting in the neighbor’s yard. We’re in a very urban environment, and they’ve claimed our backyard, theirs, and the entire parking lot between as their sacred homeland, which must defended for the honor of their clan.
You’d think a fearsome warrior like my perpetually-trying-to-kill-the-neighbor-cat-for-ten-years-straight kitty would be the first one to whap the swooping Jays on sight. Fortunately, he is terrified of them. He can’t even poop outside without me going out to stand between him and the Jay’s. He’s that incapable of dealing with them. And they are quite persuasive.
This has all been quite off-putting to Trick. He has been locked in an absolutely epic battle with Hyphy, the neighbor’s equally large feline, for the entire time we’ve lived here. While it is true that Trick is — and I say this with a huge amount of fuzzy love for him — a giant bastard, it is not all his fault. Hyphy, after we moved in and kept Trick inside for the first year, would come to the window to see Trick. Upon getting nose-to-nose with the newcomer, Hyphy would turn around, place is anus upon the window, and piss all over it.
Such an act of war has caused an ensuing brace of near constant hostilities, the culmination of which usually involves my wife or I going out in the middle of the night to pry them apart. The neighbors dump a bucket of water on them. Either way, we just all want to sleep. We’re not into listening to kitty opera at 2 AM.
This pair of mated Jays who have nested nextdoor, however, are something even these kitties, 4X their size and 10X their weight, cannot deal with. The Jays will not let them be. Not for one second. Not outside in the driveway, not even inside their own homes.
And there is a lesson here.
Do not poke the bear.
Our cat would never have noticed these Jays. He’s never caught bird, save for the wren that flew into our dining room. Even then, he soft mouthed it, we put it outside, and locked him in.
Well, tonight, under cover of darkness, our cat staged a behind-enemy-lines raid of the Blue Jays’ nest. He came in with a baby. It was really a teenager. We put it outside with some water underneath the nest, a place the Jays clearly consider to be their territory….
We locked him inside.
But still, I am now looking at my usually self-interested cat. He literally formulated a revenge plot. He thinks it’s us versus them. He used the cover of darkness. He did not harm the hostage.