Last night, around 1 in the morning, I was woken up by a lot of strange noises coming from downstairs. I couldn't quite place the noises, but there were definitely animals involved. I scraped myself out of bed and went to take a look. It turns out that my cat had brought home a playmate - a Kolea.
The kolea is the Hawaiian name for the Pacific Golden Plover. This is a smallish seabird, but it's a tough one. Their annual migration involves nonstop overwater flight from Alaska to Hawaii, so they've got stamina. They also have a very sharp beak. This turned out to be a bad thing for the cat.
As closely as I can figure it, she managed to grab one while it was sleeping, and dragged it home with her. She let it go when she got in, probably figuring on having some fun. At that point, the now fully-awake-and-severely-pissed bird started beating the living crap out of her. When I got downstairs, the cat was running around in circles in the living room, trying to dodge the bird. The bird was beating the cat with its wings and was pecking at it. The dog was busy trying to hide under the sofa. (50 pound dog, 4 inch sofa to ground clearance.)
Final score: it took me 15 minutes to chase the bird out of the house. I got pecked a couple of times in the process and twisted my ankle tripping over the dog. The cat was bleeding from three or four spots. There were several little clumps of black fur on the ground. And one feather.
- Log in to post comments
Natural selection in action! :)
No offense, but as a bird owner I gotta say I really enjoyed certain aspects of this story. (You go, PGP!)
Hehehehehe. Stupid cat.
Mike,
I gotta say I'm more than a little disappointed. A ScienceBlogger who lets his cat roam loose outside?! Nothing like letting a non-native predator terrorize the local wildlife. And on an island with no native terretrial mammalian predators--come on evolutionary biologist! That Pacific Golden-Plover (federally protected by the way), despite maybe winning the fight with your cat, has a very good chance of dieing of an infection. Birds that survive cat attacks and appear unhurt almost always have punture wounds, and cat bites are notoriously nasty as far as causing infection. The American Bird Conservancy's Cats Indoors program has a special page for Hawaii. Sorry I don't know how to post the link live: http://www.abcbirds.org/cats/states/hawaii_intro.htm
That's a more than reasonable point, and I'm not real thrilled that the cat is still an outdoor animal. This particular cat is one generation removed from feral - the mother followed the kids home from the playground at a point when she was too far pregnant to fix, and dropped a litter of seven on us. I attempted to keep the kittens indoors, but by the time they were eight weeks old they were ripping through screens and escaping.
Getting rid of the cat would probably be the right thing to do, but (a) I'm too much of a softy to do that to my kids, and (b) there are so many feral cats in the area that it wouldn't make much of a difference.
I try to appease my guilty conscience by rounding up feral litters and taking them to the humane society whenever I can, reducing the population that way.