Newsletter – July 4, 2025
Our world of wild animals out the window just widened!
[Don’t you just love a large load of alliteration?]
We’d given up on Tabitha bringing around kittens again this year. Since the day she showed up non-pregnant on our back deck, we’ve been counting the days when we’d get to see another brood. There were four kittens last year.
A month went by and we told each other that little creatures at the bottom of the food chain don’t stand much chance in the wild. And when a fox toured our deck, sniffing for prey, turning up his nose at the bowl of cat food, and trotting around like he owned the place, we had to accept the circle-of-life nature of…well…Nature.
Almost two months to the day of Tabby’s un-pregnancy, Debbie spied a little critter at the lip of our neighbor’s backyard (the edge of the ravine) and saw Tabitha run and herd it back into the brush. A kitten.
Were there others in the litter who got eaten or didn’t survive? We don’t know, but Tabitha’s pregnancy belly was much smaller than last year, so maybe the kitten count was low. We’ve only seen the one.
Since then, they’ve been hanging out in our neighbor’s yard, where Mama and her kitten nurse, play, and hide under the small deck. The little tyke isn’t ready for solid food yet, but Tabby shows up for her bowl of cat food every morning.
Guess who else is stopping by? Yep, Rocki’s brood, who I refer to as The Three Stooges. Raccoons decide at an early age that it’s every man for himself and their meals are hard-scrabble contests that result in flying pieces of kibble getting caught between the boards. They don’t hit each other in the face like their human namesakes, but they use their hefty behinds to butt each other aside and grab the food like a bunch of bumper cars at a drive-thru.
When I open the sliding glass door they scramble off the deck like a carload of circus clowns. Between their slapstick comedy and the kitten’s high flying leaps through the grasses, we have the best entertainment just outside our windows.
Debbie got a great evening shot of the kitten walking under the living room window. I think he’s imagining himself sneaking up behind an unsuspecting rodent. Not that he’s gonna find a mouse small enough to trap between his little pads, but then he’s only practicing, and exercising his instincts.
I don’t know that he’s a him, actually. I read that tabbies are about 50/50. Toss of the little stripedy little coin, I guess.
TTFN
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A SECOND KITTEN: Stop the presses! [I always wanted to say that.]
A day after I wrote the Margerumalia above, an orange tabby emerged from under our neighbors deck. This one’s smaller than the other and is an orange tabby, just as adorable as the first but not as bold.
Here’s Debbie’s best shot of the O.T. so far:
Keep your fingers crossed that we can find homes for these little ones. And that we can cage a very cagey Mama Cat and get her spayed. [I snuck in some more alliteration there. Did you see that? Yeah, I figured you would.]
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Eric Margerum 