I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Yesterday was Homecoming. Bow was very excited as preparations were made. He likes my daughter's boyfriend and was happy to say "Hi" to him. The kitten, on the other hand, was a little frightened of the interloper.
Not used to males, the kitten was shy. But with me, it bares all. And for some time now, I have had a nagging suspicion that we may have been too hasty in our assessment. Maybe there is more there to this kitten than we first believed.
Yesterday, Sword's boyfriend confirmed it. We have a male on our hands. So now the kitten's name is no longer Nala, but Nile.
In November, when it starts to get cold, Nile is going to go live with my daughter's boyfriend, because I am not able -- due to my allergy to cat dander -- to allow the cat into the house, and it will need someplace warm to spend the winter. But my daughter will still spend plenty of quality time with Nile, so he is not being abandoned. Come springtime, he may return here.
I have found that if I do a little mowing in the backyard every day, it does not have to become an overwhelming chore.
Leo is very invested in my mowing
I can take lots of little breaks to smell the flowers.
The Asian dayflowers bloom early each day and then wilt
Leo and Brownie and Bow are all there to participate, each in his own way.
Bow watches me as I mow from inside the outer pen
Sometimes I will take a break on the trampoline, and can view everything that is happening in the yard from a nice vantage point.
Of course, I am not as high up as, say, a kitten on the roof, but that is okay.
Even though I have only mowed about half the yard today, I can take time off when lunch comes around. Later Bow suggests that I go out for a walk in the front yard. I ask him why, and he says because it is good. But he adds: "רק אל תדברי עם החתול". "Just don't talk to the cat."
I don't talk to the kitten, but there is no way I can keep it from talking to me, as it meows at me from the roof as I go out the front door for my walk.
In the pasture there are many new flowers I have not seen before.
Because the path through the pasture passes right by the barn, I have been avoiding it, thinking this would get the kitten to following me.
But now that I know that the kitten does not spend any time in the barn at all, and that it is on the roof all the time, I feel better about venturing into this unspoiled wilderness without an exotic carnivore at my heals.
I can observe the bumblebee on the blossom without fear of disturbance from a feline follower.
"This blossom is occupied," said the beetle to the bumblebee.
On my way back down the path after completing a circuit of the pasture, I encounter a couple of turtles. They are going single file, one after the other.
Could it be mating season? Is this a male pursuing a female? (My turtle expert, Pam Keyes later confirms this.)
Just then I hear a meowing in the background.
The kitten suddenly appears and moves in to investigate.
Just let me check what it smells like!
This is a bit disturbing. What would a kitten do with a turtle, if left to its own devices? It backs away from the turtles when I am watching, but I do not trust it alone with them.
Eventually, as the kitten will not go far so long as the turtles are still there and I am still there, and I am concerned about what might happen if I leave first, I pick up the kitten by the scruff of its neck -- which it allows, as I am like a mother cat when I do this -- and I lock it momentarily in a storage building where we keep discarded toys.When I return moments later to check on the turtles, they are nowhere in sight. They move fast when you are not looking! So I go back and let the kitten out of storage. It follows me all the way home, and once I am inside it probably goes back up on the roof.
I meant to do as Bow asked and not talk to the cat, but that is more easily said than done.
After the rain, the first thing I noticed when I walked out the door was that the wild roses had bloomed.
The anthers in the center of the bloom were looking all bedraggled and bunched up, either because they had just now opened, or because they had been rained on.
Little insects that looked a lot like bees, but were much smaller, began to exploit the blossoms. I was surprised by the appearance of the flowers. Hadn't these been pink last year?
After the rain, the tulip tree leaves were covered with raindrops, and inside the blossoms there was water to drink.
Tiny little insects had gathered inside the blossoms, but I could not tell if they were after pollen, nectar or just water. A bee who was resting on one of the bracts of the flowers backed out and began to approach the blossom.
It seemed to be asking itself: Will all the other insects mind if I join them?
Gingerly, it came in for the landing.
But once it entered the flower, it did not stay long.
Later in the evening, after visiting the kitten in the barn, I was examining some berries in the woods, when I saw a rabbit by the lagoon.
The rabbit saw me, too, but it allowed me to come in for a closer look, before it bounded away.
I have seen a lot fewer rabbits close to the house this year, and this too might be an indication that the cat is still around.
I wanted to ask the rabbit if it had seen the cat, and this reminded me of the children's book I wrote for Sword many years ago. Wild animals do not snitch on other wild animals, even when they are natural enemies. That's why the best I can do is just try to read the signs.
My friend Krys identified it as a Star of Bethlehem ( Ornithogalum umbellatum ).
The tulip tree opened its blossoms for the first time this year.
Tulip tree flower that opened May 7, 2015
And when I checked on the kitten in the afternoon, it greeted me at the door to the barn. It was no longer confined to the stroller.
The cat is out of the bag now! I thought. Of course, it was bound to happen. I could not expect that kitten to remain in the stroller forever. The fact that it decided to explore a little further shows that it is healthy and growing. But for whoever is responsible for it, this opens up a whole new can of worms. How is the kitten going to be kept safe now?
And that's where I have to trust that Mother Cat is going to do her job, as I have too many other responsibilities to be babysitting a kitten all day long.
This moment comes with every baby. It happened with Sword, and it happened with Bow. They went from being totally helpless and dependent to being mobile little walking disasters who had to be kept out of harm's way without crushing their independence.
Sword and I on October 17, 1999 in Taiwan
Sword went from this helpless being who was not much bigger than the logbook into which three people wrote down everything she ate in three languages -- Chinese, Hebrew and English ....
Sword was six months old at the turn of the millennium
... to this very active toddler when we moved to this property just after she turned two.
Sword and Teyman when we first moved here. Notice how small the forsythia bush is!
You can see a small part of the tulip tree in the top left corner of the photo
And then Bow was added to the mix,
Sword supervises Bow in 2002
He learned to walk early, but Bow, despite this, was so dependent for the next few years that he did not like to stray far from me.
Bow becoming mobile
He stayed as close to me as my fanny pack through the early years.
In the old hammock in the sun room
He had lots of fun, both indoors and out, and did not need to be confined, because he was way too attached to us to go anywhere we did not go.
He stuck very close to us, indoors and out, so we did not have to worry that he would wander away.
Hanging off the dogwood tree
It's not the fence that kept Bow in the yard -- it's that he wanted to stay close to Sword
I could take him for Easter egg hunts off our property, and there would be no danger that he would wander off and get lost, because he was sticking close to the people he loved,
During an Easter egg hunt on another property
Bow always found the ones higher in the tree
Bow was always careful to keep us within sight, and the best way to prevent him from wandering off would be to walk in the opposite direction of where he was headed. He would make a piercing "I'm about to be abandoned!" sound and scamper onto my back every time he sensed I was getting ready to leave.
Let's go explore without Mommy
If he wanted to go exploring away from Mommy, Bow would recruit Sword to come with him, holding onto her hand tightly.
But the day eventually came when Bow felt confident to do things on his own, things we could not do.
Bow overlooking the yard
And that was the day when my job of keeping him safe got much harder.
Bow hanging off the liquidambar tree
That is the last photo I have of Bow unconfined. I continued to carry him on my back till he was five years old. As long as he was on my back, he stayed out of trouble, But the day came when I could no longer support his weight, and he objected to being left in the pen when I ran errands, so I had to confine him to the pens permanently. Which is how we got to be where we are.
I still have to be with Bow in the pen most of the hours of most of the day, which is why I cannot possibly afford to baby sit a kitten. I will leave that task to Mother Cat.
I left the food and water and scrammed. It would have been nice to stay a while and play with the kitten, but I am allergic, and Mother Cat is watching. So I went to look at the tulip tree, instead.
Several bees share a tulip tree flower
As most of the tulip tree flowers are still closed, the bees were crowded several to a flower.
That works fine for smaller bees, but if you are a bumblebee, it can get too crowded.
The accommodations for a bumblebee are considerably less commodious.
Depending on their size, you can fit at least two wasps in a flower, though.
However, the bigger the wasp, the more room it needs.
So, that was yesterday. Today, we have a bleak and rainy morning.
The cat and the kitten, the birds and the bees will just have to fend for themselves for the time being.
Bow is asleep on his blanket, and all is right with the world.
Every day, Bow gets a wide variety of foods, most of them pretty natural, but some more on the junky side of the menu. None of it is food he has grown or hunted for or caught or picked. It's "unnatural", but it is also life in the lap of luxury.
Bow enjoying a strawberry
Meanwhile, on my ten acre property, lots of other animals are dining, too, al fresco, from things that grow here naturally. Some of them are even feeding on each other, and most of the drama and color of their lives is something that takes place when I am not looking.
I do patrol my land daily, and I take note of many things, like new flora that I have not noticed before. Did you know there are wild grape vines growing in my woods?
I will stop and take pictures of little bees as they enjoy the dandelions.
It is harmless voyeurism on my part.
But the majority of what goes on on my own property is not known to me, and that is just as it should be. Should I mourn the passing of every little sparrow? I am not cut out for that. Anyway, yesterday, late in the afternoon, I was chasing a colorful beetle, because I wanted to take its picture, but the beetle got away and it led me to the barn. I opened the door to the barn, and I forgot all about the beetle.
There, inside my daughter's old stroller, a tiny orange kitten was cowering.
As I tried to come in closer, to get a better look, it hissed at me. It was at once so tiny and helpless, yet so fierce. At first, I thought: "An abandoned kitten!" But then I realized it was probably not abandoned at all. Its mother was probably lurking just out of sight.
There is no way that a human being -- of the evil sort we imagine when we think of abandoned animals -- trekked all the way through my tick and flea infested pasture through the brambles and the briars in the dead of night when no one was looking just to very conveniently dump this kitten in the padded stroller in my barn. It is much more likely that a feral cat gave birth to the kitten on my property and chose the stroller for its safe place. And if I were to even so much as touch the kitten, the mother, who might be watching from the loft, would pounce on me.
I bought that stroller before my daughter was born, in preparation. We took it to Taiwan, where it proved to be way too broad to navigate the narrow, teeming streets without sidewalks. It was built for sturdy American notions of safety, but it was not practical for a country such as Taiwan. Nevertheless, it was the only stroller I had, so Sword used it for two years in Taiwan, and we brought it home to the United States where, in time, even Bow got to use it. Eventually, we didn't need it anymore, and it has been sitting vacant in the barn for many years until now, when another mother has found a use for it.
The animal rights activists think that being tame or wild is a genetic issue. The cat is a species that has been "domesticated". The chimpanzee is a wild species that has not been domesticated. But there are wild cats and tame chimpanzees, and it all depends on how they were raised. For intelligent species like cats and chimpanzees, it's nurture as well as nature, and culture is just as important as biology.
I'm not telling my daughter about the kitten in the barn, because she will want to adopt it. But as long as the kitten has a mother, I think I had best leave it to its mother's care. I put out a bowl of milk in the barn, not for the kitten who probably can't drink it, but for the mother who might like to know that I pose it no danger. As long as it stays in the vicinity of the barn and hunts for mice, I have no quarrel with the cat.
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