NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/573001
36 NEBRASKAland • OCTOBER 2015 I t was four summers ago, and I would see him in our garden or sitting on the wood pile, always slinking away as I approached. I told my wife Grace about the stray cat hanging around. Then one day, while Grace was in the backyard, the stray approached her and she petted him. Seeing that he was half-starved and sickly, she fed him and that cinched it. His new hangout was our back porch. He was neutered and declawed; cer- tainly this was someone's pet, either lost or abandoned. Our plan was to keep him until we found his owner, but we never did and he was ours for good. I called him Spike, but Grace disliked the name. Then I suggested we call him Keith Richards. Like the Rolling Stones guitarist, the cat had a tousled look, an attitude and same apparent ability to survive a life of hard living. We compromised and named him KR. KR came with issues. For one, like many male cats, he marked his territory, which when inside, included our furniture: and therefore, he stayed an outdoors cat. At night he is locked in our garage and his days are spent roaming the neighborhood, lounging in the sun, and doing other cat things. As for his other issue, he is a natural born killer, his hunting skills likely honed while fending for himself as a stray. The dead mice left on our back porch did not bother me, nor the deceased rabbits and squirrels. The local rabbit colony often browsed my young beets and bean sprouts to the ground, and the dang squirrels have the bad habit of snatching the nearly ripe pears from our tree. The population of both could stand a little thinning. It was the piles of feathers he left on the porch that bothered me. The cat wasn't killing the pesky non-native house sparrows, European starlings or Eurasian collared-doves. No, KR was knocking off cool native birds – American robins, a cedar waxwing, a brown creeper, a white- crowned sparrow or two. I feared his list of species killed would soon top my life list of birds observed. The carnage peaked in spring when migrants were passing through, the resident birds were distracted with mating and nesting and defenseless fledglings were about. His murdering came to a head one day two winters ago when our friend Jeanine, an avid birder, was visiting. Having just left through the back door, she poked her head back inside and bluntly said, "There's a dead cardinal out here," then departed. That did it, the killer KR had to be tamed. I searched the internet for a solution. One site sold bells to hang on the cat's collar and another, battery powered beepers to warn prey that danger is lurking. Both are apparently somewhat effective, but many bell-wearing cats learn to become stealthier hunters, silencing the bells and reducing their Story and photos by Gerry Steinauer, botanist What to Do With a Bird-eating Cat KR sporting his Birdsbesafe collar.