The Case of the Disappearing Cat

In order not to frighten the guests by live mice (or a naked Chris) running round the bedrooms in the middle of the night, Mr Binks was locked in the kitchen for the night with no access to outside. Awake by 7:30 I decided to go down and give him his freedom, only to find two guests already in kitchen indicating that although they hadn't seen the cat they thought they had heard a faint mewing and thought he was up with us. Logically he must still be in the kitchen, all doors were shut and there was no furniture he could hide under.

So where was he?

The only cupboard he had shown an interest in was the one under the sink with access to the back of the kitchen units, certainly a mouse hunting ground, but the door was shut. However, when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. So I opened the door. There sat Binks in the washing-up bowl. With a plaintiff mew and a single bound he was free, to wait by his biscuit bowl for breakfast. Looking back he must have pulled at the door till it opened enough for him to wedge it with his head and then body. Once in, the door has one of these hinges which snap it shut once it is nearly closed. Unfortunately it doesn't say much for his intelligence that he did not realise he only needed to push against it to get out again.

It's been while so I thought I'd try a bring you up to date. First off the catch details; two weekends in the country and each yielded the same; three mice. One deceased and one brought to the bedroom in, to all intents and purposes, the middle of the night. The remaining one seems to have escaped whilst being carried across the kitchen. On weekend one it got behind the fitted kitchen. This meant Binks was obliged to sit behind the units for long periods to no avail. We didn't see the critter. That is until Sunday morning when studying the papers, out it popped and made a bee-line for the wood-pile. We fooled it into a paper bag and arranged its release. Binks? He was asleep upstairs the whole time.

We had guests last weekend and they were most amused. The escapee was under the sofa this time or more accurately, clinging to the upholstery at the back. It was a simple matter to pull the furniture away from the wall and prod the cowering creature into the paper carrier bag. We're getting quite good at this. And there were birds too - in London. Both midweek; first time a wren which seemed to escape and Tuesday, a young blackbird. The latter was pursued by its parent, screeching. All this at about 10:00pm. Binks is quite willing to release his prey - it seems a sure thing that they're for us - and I managed to get the bird into yet another paper carrier after it wouldn't or couldn't fly away. I released it around the front where the blackbirds congregate. Binks didn't seem interested in going out again once we had our present.

Insecta

As I have a feeling 'Red, in Tooth and Claw' could run and run, let's call a halt though, in the interests of accuracy, we may have to keep discreet count of the wildlife in order to verify or defuse the statistics widely promulgated.

So it's a single mouse, tiny and alive although traumatised. I think that the field mice/voles freeze when disturbed as a defence against their more usual predators, hawks. I didn't hold out much hope for this one as it seemed paralysed even after a chance to recover in a paper cup. But on release to the wild it was gone within ten minutes. I don't think we should count the escapees.

But down to insects. We have to be honest - he has fleas. All these seem to come from visits to the country and they may not be cat fleas. They are relatively easy to pick off his ears as there is very little fur there and they stand out against the white. Maybe the fleas parasitise the voles. Most likely they live in the long grass waiting for a passing warm blooded creature (though I havn't been bitten myself and cat fleas really like me). If it stays like this - easy to control manually - we needn't treat him with chemicals. I'm glad to note that they don't seem to affect him as badly as some cats.

And Moths. Last night he brought in a rather beautiful moth. At least it had been once. It was clear-winged and so almost certainly a Narrow or Broad Banded Bee Hawkmoth. This is not the first moth he's brought back, an Old Lady appeared a month ago or so - he seems only to bring the large ones indoors. Both were nominally alive and although I put them out into the garden, I didn't hold out as much hope for them as I do the mice.

Moths are well represented on the web; the pictures above come from UK Moths which is excellent. For hawkmoths there is the marvellous, authorative yet somehow eccentric, Sphingidae of the Western Palaearctic. He doesn't have pictures for the Narrow Bordered Bee Hawk but there are pictures for the Broad along with intimidatingly precise information.

Red, in Tooth and Claw (III)

Ah. Spoke too soon.

This morning it was a rat. Dead. By the kitchen door to the stairs. The looks to have been a certain amount of disruption upstairs in the front room on the rug. These are not pictures I particularly want to fix so let's move on.

We've never really had a cat that caught rats before (let's not kid ourselves, in London they say on average you're only ever twenty feet away from one). It's just that unless instructed, cats don't catch - much less kill - rats. According to Roger Tabor's The Wild Life of the Domestic Cat they have to be taught to catch and kill them by their mothers and only a small proportion do so even then (preferring human handouts to the danger of killing a biting creature with your teeth). I wonder, where did he learn?

Red, in Tooth and Claw (II)

This post got delayed so the final toll could be established.

Last weekend was at the country venue and on Saturday morning we discovered a mouse outside the front door - dead. Binks ingored it and so did we - slightly wrong-footed to find ourselves with no means of burying it. That state of affairs persisted until he tried to take it indoors. That was an easier experience compared to the live one he brought to the bedroom in the early hours of next morning.

Curiously he didn't seem to mind attempts to take it off him or even being summarily dumped in the bathroom. There's virtually no furniture in the room I'm glad to say because, though starting near the door, the mouse ran away from it and around the perimeter. There was nowhere to hide and pursued by two humans it completed the circuit and was out the door and down the landing. Eventually, at the top of the stairs, I caught up with it and fooled it into a carrier bag. Mouse thus captured I dressed with brevity and wandered outside blinking in the early dawn to release it away from the house.

Binks was released from the Bathroom. He didn't seem to mind - it clearly takes a lot to upset him. He took a few sniffs at the spot where he had released it and then settled on the bed for the rest of the morning. The whole episode seems to reinforce the idea that he only catches them for us.

Back to London and on Monday morning the front room is carpeted in feathers. This time from an unfortunate blackbird. Is he glad to be back and this is a present? Every morning since, the first of us down has looked hesitantly around the door in the front room (where they're found according to current modus operandii) but fortunately we've not seen any more.