Aww. Hopefully she will repay your kindness by becoming a top predator in the barns. I had a tortoiseshell cat like her who was a prolific killer.
To be honest I’m not really a cat person. I don’t dislike them, but given the choice of five minutes with a cat or five minutes with this or this the cat is not my first choice! ….but the cat does purr!
The frequent feedings are more annoying this time of year. In the spring someone is midwifing every two hours anyway. This time of year we are down to just a couple foal watches per night. We call them “calicoes” here. I guess it’s a “her”. I used to check every time because someone told me as a kid a male calico was worth big money! I may have a million dollar cat on my hands and not know because I’ve never checked! LOL
I used to love playing with our Pigmy Goats. When the one male was a little one, before the buds came in and got big, he liked to have head-pushing contests with me. He would stand on a ledge that put us face to face. I would put my head down, and he would put his head down and move forward ever so slowly, until we made good contact. And then he would push for all he was worth!!! It was so funny! And he was clearly being careful not to hurt me. I couldn't get over that!!! When his buds came in, eventually I decided it may not be good to continue!
Tortoiseshell cats are orange and black calicoes are orange, black and white. Couldn't see any white in the picture but the white is often underneath the body. You won't get a million for a male tortoiseshell but if the markings are attractive you might get a thousand. About 1 in 3000 born is male. Ginger females like Boudica (my avatar pic) are relatively common at about 1 in a 100 and always have some white in their coat. You will never get a pure ginger female.
Most of my baby pics are taken in birthing pens that have no vegetation because of being small with some kind of critter in them all the time. The critters essentially keep all the green stuff eaten off. We started out dry this winter/spring but have had adequate rain this summer. Here are a couple more representative pics. The bull was taken yesterday morning—he was out of his pasture in the neighbor’s hay field. He just stepped over the fence I’d let down into his pasture in the photo. The draft horse’s picture was last week as are the flower and donkey pics.
Raedwald seems to have progressed from mice to rabbits. At this rate he'll be hunting sheep by this time next year.
I wonder if that stigma exists much anymore. I know it doesn't out here in our neck of the woods. When we adopted these guys six years ago (here they are a couple days after we brought them home)... ...we had a serious Copperhead snake problem. But we let the cats run loose and hunt critters and eventually they killed virtually all of the small rodents around our house that the snakes used to prey on. Once the cats wiped out their food supply the Copperheads stopped showing up and now things are a lot safer than they used to be. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that when we adopted the kittens they would solve our viper problem, but they did. Like a lot of cats that live out in the country they're working cats. Not only are they great companions but they have a job to do and they do it well. The only problem is now that they're full grown and they can hunt together they've graduated to hunting larger animals like rabbits and squirrels and it's always a joy when they drag one into the house. It's one thing to drag a chewed up mouse inside for Show and Tell but a live rabbit or squirrel is a whole different matter...
Thanks. I’ve been trying to make myself stop and enjoy and photograph more of the wonders of nature I come across as I work. That morning I was successful. Even though we were in a hurry I stopped a few times to immortalize my “office space”.
That's some gorgeous country you live in, 557. It's always nice to see pics from other parts of the U.S..
A photographer's version of 'stop and smell the roses'. We can be tooling along out on the back roads, and when I call out stop, the spouse knows I've spotted some old barn or cow field that was needing it's picture taken.
I ran across some funny pictures of our cats when they were allowed to go outside for the first time when they were kittens 6 years ago. I'm guessing they were about 4-5 months old. The little Bombay female who was the wild one of the two was all bugged out from the things she had never seen before.... Here's her brother... ...and they're off on their first hunt....