FREELANCE CAT

This is not my cat. She is wild. This picture was taken through the window at some distance. She couldn't see me but she had seen movement.

She is one of four feral cats who come over the roof tops to the bedroom window for handouts. The other three come at night. One, a huge tom cat, looks almost exactly like this one. I suspect he is her father.

One of the others is a hissy, spitty tiger marked female and the fourth is a pretty dark grey female. She is very timid, as is the one in the picture.

The tom cat can turn and whack the window with his back feet to let me know he's there. It can be quite a performance. If I forget to close the bedroom shutters so that Cloud cannot see the tom cat, she turns into a horrible snarling slobbering beast with huge fangs and barks up a storm. The tom cat hisses back through the glass. The only way to end the standoff is to put food on the next window ledge outside the bathroom window to lure the cat away, then quickly close the bedroom shutters while Cloud huffs and puffs.

We have tried to capture the tom cat in a special cage so that he can enjoy a trip to the vet and lose bits of his anatomy, but so far, we only catch our own cat, Tigger. The big tom used to be scary and snarl at me ungratefully as I put food out; now he purrs and butts my hand. I find it interesting that he gives way to the two smaller females and lets them eat until hunger overcomes him and he joins in. It's a pleasure, in a way, to see them go at food. It's refreshing after Tigger who turns his nose up at all but the very finest cat food.

Himself saw the buzzard again this morning, quite close and sitting in an oak tree. The buzzard saw him again, too, and buzzed off but one day....

For the record: Rain, +5 C. Sunrise 7:39; sunset 5:24. It is wet and grotty out there, the colours are drab except for the day-glow green moss. The countryside waits.