Who's That (Cat) Lady?

Sorry to make you wait for this. I got it written and then couldn't get it posted. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

When we last left Zick, she was on all fours at the sliding deck door, head and camera sticking out of her big warm blind of a house into crisp 22 degree air, fffreeeaaaaking out at what she'd been blessed to see this morning. 

One bobcat in the meadow had transmuted into two, and the second cat was putting on a nice greeting display, clearly pleased to meet up with Cat #1.

 

If I could be sure of anything, it was that these two animals knew each other well.

There was not a whiff of aggression at their meeting. Just pleasure, or at the very least, a friendly tolerance of each other's presence.

 

I'd call this a social yawn. It's certainly not a snarl, nor did I hear a yowl. 

Just hello, how are you? Now I'll be passing on by. I don't know if it was this next shot that made me think I was watching a female passing a male--pretty cute the way Cat 1 watches the walk-by and licks its chops. To me, that's just the aftermath of the yawn. Bill, on the other hand, to whom I always spill the hottest, freshest animal news, had this read: "He's checkin' her out."

The second cat kept walking, and the first stayed put. But Cat 2 didn't go far. Just this far. 

Cat 1 continued grooming itself, the essence of cool.

Cat 2 walked down to the border of the meadow and looked back its length.

 

then, praise the benevolent Nature Gods, it sat down. I was dying to get a face portrait of it, as I had of Cat 1.

 

This view from the deck door was a bit obscured so I jungle-crawled back to the picture window. 

And it looked right at me. Click. Gotcha, Kitty.  Now maybe I'd be able to work a little magic. Because magic is what I like best. 

Identifying individual animals is becoming an obsession of mine. It's one of my favorites.

 Look at the big dark blotches on the cheek ruff, hanging like dangly earrings to each side. That's not something every bobcat has.

We'll come back to those. 

For now, just click on the photos and luxuriate in this beautiful, beautiful wild creature, come to grace our lives. They look best embiggened, so click and go through them.

 

They were just a stone's throw away from each other. 

Cat 2 looked around. I think I like this shot best. All those doo-dads on its fur. The earrings, the bars, the spots, more bars, more spots. Can you believe this walks my field, and sits in the frosty morning light to be adored and admired? I still can't.

Cat 2

Compare with Cat 1, who has striped cheek ruffs, but no big blotches. No lower neck bars like Cat 1. What a gift it is to have a wild cat so ornate, that a Science Chimp like me can hope to tell one from another!

Cat 1

 Cat 2 dozed for a few moments, then got bored.

 

It got up, and, looking like a mini-hyena, sloped off toward the multiflora rose mess on the meadow border. 

 

 I clicked away, wanting to record every bit of it, even its south end. I wanted to keep this encounter in my files and my heart forever.

Cat 2's exit did not go unnoticed. Cat 1 hurried to get up and follow!

 

and, amazingly, the two of them took the same path into the dense woods. 

You can see Cat 2 as a dark shape in back, while Cat 1 is just entering the brush. 

 

 And with that, the show was over. I'd had Cat 1 in view from 8:03-8:07 AM, when Cat 2 arrived. And they both disappeared at 8:12:34. Nine minutes of pure bobcat-worshipping bliss. It felt like an eternity. Time seemed to stand still.

Now you understand why I leap up from the drawing board and run through the living room so many times each day, especially in the morning.
There might be something out there.
There usually is!

About that magic...It was time to look back through my photos. Here is James, from August 17, 2016.

JAMES-2016

 James is an absolutely beautiful bobcat. Heck, they all are. What jumps out at me is the large white muzzle patch beneath his pink nose. While Cat 1, below, has two small white spots there, its dark whisker tracks go all the way across to the center line. Cat 1 also has a dark crescent on its chin, and a strong midline up the forehead. James lacks these marks. No match there.

CAT 1

 Let's look at Cat 2 again.

CINDY DEC 10 2018

Well, well, well! Hello, Cindy! You look exceptionally lovely in winter fur.  

CINDY-AUG 2017

  Here you were in August 2017, and you're wearing your dangly earrings. You have the strong V on your little white chin; the flames over your eyebrows. Sidebars on your chest, too. I'm so very glad to see you again, my dear.

CINDY AUG 2017

So Cat 2 is Cindy. Who is Cat 1? 

I don't know. I looked at the only other good bobcat face shot I have, which is off the MeatCam just a few hundred yards down the meadow. It's a huge tom from March 5, 2018.

And the dual stripes on its cheek ruffs tell me it's neither James, who has a single cheekruff stripe. nor Cat 1. This cat has a much whiter muzzle than Cat 1.

 Obviously, we got us some bobcats up here, even though actual sightings are months apart. The thought gives me a delicious shiver. So does the March sunshine in this beautiful photo. Thank you, C., for loan of this camera. It is being put to good use.

Once I figured out that Cat 2 was Cindy, I assumed Cat 1 was a male. And yesterday, it hit me...On what evidence? The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had none. Assumptions are not much good in nature sleuthing.

Yes, they were happy to see each other, relaxed and traveling together. And it is December, the start of bobcat mating season. But that doesn't automatically mean these two are mates. Thinking outside the box, Cat 1 could  be Cindy's son or daughter, though I couldn't see much, if any, size difference between them. (Cindy is about 2 1/2 now; she was a yearling in 2017). And I just don't get a heavy-boned, thick-jawed tomcat feeling from Cat 1. But maybe Cindy's a bobcat cougar. 

Heh.

Much as I scrutinize the photos of Cat 1's south end, I can't see a hint of the jewels so nicely displayed in James' and Trail Cam Cat's photo. Jury's out on Cat 1's identity. The more I look at it, though, the cuter it gets. Maybe it IS Cindy's kitten!

CAT 1

But you may be sure the Science Chimp will be watching, perfectly content to get a piece of the puzzle every few months. And trying not to be led by assumptions.

And there are several months of fresh trailcam photos yet to look at, too. I put a little beef roast end out just last evening, and the camera was still firing away. 

I think it's a good bet there will be bobcats on the card when I finally find time to download it. Full-face identifiable color shots, doubtful, but hope is what it's all about.

There are not enough hours in the day to fully appreciate this place. Not even close.

 

This may be my last blogpost for awhile, but it's a doozy, so it's a good one to leave for awhile.

xo 

jz

Thankful

We've always resisted decorating the exterior of our house, reasoning that, being 1/4 mile off a very lightly traveled road and hidden by woods, no one would see it. This year, Bill got a wild hair and threw a couple of strings of lights up in the pines in the backyard, and then he got another and wound some blue lights around some birch trunks and hung some multicolored lights in the mulberry. I'm sitting in the dark kitchen looking out at them glowing softly against the snow, and I'm thankful.

No one but we five will see them, and that's enough.

Although we went kind of coo-coo over the kids as usual, Bill and I decided to put our Christmas into replacing our 1978 vintage kitchen stove. It was a Caloric, and I still loved it and would have been willing to put up with its quirks indefinitely until Bill pulled the trigger. It was down a burner, which couldn't  be replaced because the stove had long since been declared obsolete. The three burners that remained were a bit too hot to trot and having adjustment issues that did not seem to be resolving. To wit: You'd put some chili on to cook slowly on the lowest burner setting, and you'd walk away,  as you do when cooking chili, and you'd come back to find the flame merrily blazing away on Medium High and your chili adhered firmly and blackly to the bottom of the pot. We developed an elaborate system of cast iron frying pans overturned and stacked to run interference between the overzealous burners and our food. It was time.

photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

It's a dead heat who's more thrilled about the stove: us or Phoebe. This is her inaugural batch of chocochipcookies. For those who wonder, it's a Frigidaire Gallery with on-demand convection and no drawer broiler, because those things spook me. We were looking at the model one notch above this one and about to settle on it when I noticed that it had printed on the touch panel the words

PIZZA             CHICKEN NUGGETS

Now, if we put pizza in our oven it's the homemade kind that Bill constructs from the risen dough up. And I have not had a chicken nugget in the house since 2008 when I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. I took the backlog of frozen Tyson nuggets, formerly a favorite of Liam's, out to the meadow and dumped them out for the vultures, along with a bunch of other stuff that had aged out in the freezer. The vultures, coyotes, opossums, crows and foxes ate everything but the nuggets. You read right. The nuggets just lay there, barely changing in form through snow and rain, until they rotted away.

Would somebody get this frikkin' chicken nugget off my freezer-burned pot roast?

Photo by MeatCam

Needless to say, we were not about to drop an extra $200 to get a high-end range that had printed presets for frozen pizza and chicken nuggets on its touch panel. I was not going to look at the words

PIZZA     CHICKEN NUGGETS

every day until they put me in the elderhopper.

 That was a deal breaker. I said as much to our spectacularly unhelpful salesman at Lowe's, who had touted the presets for heat-and-eat foodoid items as a big plus, and he responded, "Ah. Food Nazi, huh?" Oh, that's how you endear yourself to a potential customer. Note to NumbNuts: There are still some people out here who know how to cook, who load the grocery belt with fresh produce and raw meats instead of pre-formed derivatives of corn. We are vanishing, but we do still exist. Tell you what. You go ahead and ingest your fast fake

PIZZA    CHICKEN NUGGETS

and we'll construct and eat our snooty real slow food. Sieg Heil!

Hm. I seem to have digressed. I am thankful for our new stove, and each time we bake we marvel anew at its perfection. Phoebe and I made a Danish Puff a couple of nights ago that was the highest, most fabulously evenly golden Danish Puff we'd ever seen. The stove runs off our free gas. Thankful.

Thankful for our blossoming cartoonist, who's working on a series about a superhero onion named Produce Man. He's done two issues and is working on the third, The Adventures of Produce Man and the Awfully Alarming Apples.

Here he's explaining it all to Wendy, a lead vocalist and keyboard player for our new band The Rain Crows. We're playing January 7 at The Adelphia Music Hall in Marietta, Ohio. It has a built-in sound system and a soundman. So we won't be lugging a couple of tons of equipment. Thankful again. And very excited.    

The Raincrows: Jeff Eller, Wendy Eller, Bill Thompson II, Craig Gibbs, JZ and Chet Baker, Mascot 

Photo by Phoebe Linnea Thompson

We wish you a peaceful Christmas, full of music, real food, and love. Just let me wrap all day, then sit and stare at  the Christmas tree with a kid on my lap. That's all I want.