A Game of Cat & Bird

I was hanging out in the kitchen, fussing over a batch of fresh kale with peanut sauce, when I heard this loud chirping, something akin to when you walk by the bird section of a pet store. It sounded like a whole covey of chatty avian creatures (or however one might refer to a group of passerines), but I was preoccupied with the peanuts, peanut butter, and peanut oil, so I just assumed the birds on the side of the house were extra chirpy this evening.

And then my cat filed in on cue, a totally freaked out and sputtering English sparrow preceding her by a few inches.

Batty, bat, bat, bat, indeed. The cat and the bird, the bird and the cat. Not my favorite sight to behold, which is why we put this very obnoxiously bell-loud collar on Nacho.

But bell be damned: our cat had managed to take down a youngster songster, a little sweet junk-bird.

Next thing I knew, Nacho had chased the sweet little sparrow under a table, and poor birdie had wedged herself between the wall and the back left table leg. And there the freaked and tweaked thing sat, perfectly still, perfectly peep-less.

Until I had the brilliant idea of snatching her up with a pair of tongs.

When I did, she fluttered into the next room, where I was able to again gently nab her between two rods of stainless steel and release her out a window.

To watch her fly away toward a tree unharmed completely made my day.

It's amazing to me how animals go about their business all around us--building nests, chomping away at our wooden home (we found a monstrous carpenter ant in our upstairs bedroom the other day, but neither my husband or I bothered to pick it up and toss it outside; we decided this was one of the many reasons we were made for each other), biting us in the night (spiders? fleas?), stealing the strawberries (squirrel thieves!), generally doing what they were put on this earth to do (including stalking and killing). All while I'm fluttering about not unlike a that sparrow in the kitchen, oblivious to the near-constant dramas not only in and around our home but out there in the cosmos.