Cats

Buffy the Bird Slayer

I remarked to my mother that one of our cats killed a lot of birds. My mother’s answer was to the point: “She only kills the dumber birds.”

Photo by John Tecuceanu on Unsplash

Times have changed. Many things were different when I was a young boy in the 1950s. You could see more stars, the traffic was less, and there were a lot more birds. Bird song would wake us up in the morning, not a summer day went by without hearing a woodpecker, and owls hooted in the night. If you happened to own a cat that was good at hunting birds, that didn’t upset you, because birds were everywhere. Their droppings were everywhere, on every car, every sidewalk, and now and then you’d catch one square on the head. There was no shortage of birds.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring wasn’t published until 1962. We weren’t worried about pesticides, and we certainly weren’t concerned about our cats.

That’s not entirely true. I did remark to my mother once that one of our cats killed a lot of birds. My mother’s answer was to the point: “She only kills the dumber birds.”

Buffy, the orange cat we were talking about, was indeed a bird-killing machine. She was also crazy.

No, not crazy. But neurotic, as my mother said of her. High strung, nervous, edgy…