Hello, Kitty. Make My Day...

While Ginny and I enjoyed our long holiday last weekend, we discussed a recurring problem.

We enjoy watching birds. We keep four birdfeeders at various places in our yard so we can see the birds wherever we sit with our morning coffee. These birdfeeders have been in the same locations for over ten years, so the birds know just where to find food as they migrate through our neighborhood.

Our feathered friends know they are welcome to eat, bathe in the birdbaths and nest in the trees on our property. Some of the same birds come year after year.

Last weekend we talked about whether it might be wise to move the feeders farther away from the house in the light of the impending bird flu epidemic which is projected to kill millions of people. One of my aunts lived through the 1918 Spanish Flue epidemic and told me all sorts of horror stories about that plague. But Ginny and I decided to leave the feeders where they are even with this threat.

But the problem with our feeders is the neighborhood cats.

These vile creatures know that birds congregate at our feeders. These cats slink through the fence and lurk beneath bushes near the feeders. When a poor defenseless bird lights on the ground to eat seed fallen from the feeders. This huge black snarling cat lunges out with claws flashing and disembowels baby birds right in front of their mother’s eyes. The cat will crunch tiny bones and scatter bloody feathers right underneath the feeders.

For evidence in case we ever have to go to court over this matter, I tried to snap photos of these atrocities but the depraved cat slinks back into the bushes too fast for my camera to catch the deprivations. So I called my artist buddy Picasso who has a quick eye for such things and he came over to hang out, sip coffee and draw a quick sketch of the cat in action. He often likes to set up his easel and paint in our backyard.

Here’s a picture Picasso whipped up for me:

Picasso suggested that we set the water sprinkler near the bushes to hinder the beast’s marauding. That worked for a few days, until the water bill came in and we found we can’t afford to keep sprinklers going 24 hours a day.

So, I walked over to the local High School and explained my problem to the kids in the science club there. My problem interested them so they broke off their class science project of producing crystal meth and began a little experiment in gene splicing and cloning to help me out. Here is the result of their work:

Here Kitty. Here Kitty! Here Kitty, Kitty.

Actually, before Oprah exposes me on her show, I confess that Picasso hardly ever drops by our house for coffee; but the fuzzy little kitten painting really is one of his.

And local high school kids did not stop making meth. No, the bird dog photo comes from a website called When Cloning Goes Bad; you can find it at: http://floatingworldweb.com/EARTHLINGZ/GALLERIES/CLONES/index.htm

I ran across dozens of such doctored photos while surfing the net the other day when I should have been working and I thought the site was such fun that I wanted to share it.

The only thing true in this posting is that bird flu is real, and cats really do haunt our birdfeeders, and that I’d always rather screw around on the net than work.