![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_2\/1940_cat.jpg\")
\nThere’s a new young cat in the neighbourhood. Looks like it might have been let out of the house for the first time: it’s exploring, discovering, cautiously but curiously poking its nose in all sorts of places. I had to shoo it out of the basement twice, and keep the doors closed to keep it out of the house.<\/p>\n
We’ve seen its like before. One spring, a young cat out for the first time when its family had gone away from the day, came into our house looking completely lost and abandoned. So much so that we thought it might have run away and took it to a nearby vet to scan its chip and find out who it belonged to. He turned out to be called Sid, and lived just two houses away from us.<\/p>\n
Sid and his family have moved away, but there are several other cats whom I recognize by sight. They are all older and feel more at home in the neighbourhood. They walk in a very different manner – more confidently and purposefully.<\/p>\n
One thing the young and old cats apparently all have in common is a love of birds. Not our kind of love, but the kind that expresses itself in hunting and eating the birds. This kitty quickly discovered the bird nest box up in our cherry tree and decided to go fish for baby birds. Climbed up and poked its paw inside the box and tried to catch things.<\/p>\n
When I had chased it down from the tree with a broom twice over, I had enough and decided to saw off the branch that seemed to offer it best access to the nest box. (It was mostly dead anyway.) I’m hoping that this will make bird-fishing less comfortable for the cat, so the cat will find some other fun activity and leave the box alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a new young cat in the neighbourhood. Looks like it might have been let out of the house for the first time: it’s exploring, discovering, cautiously but curiously poking its nose in all sorts of places. I had to shoo it out of the basement twice, and keep the doors closed to keep it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,22,774,768,779],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-house_and_garden","category-neighbourhood","category-photography-2","category-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12741"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12747,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12741\/revisions\/12747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}