Cat Scaring for Beginners

Before I am deluged with hate mail from all you cat lovers out there I have to declare I I too am a cat lover or long standing.  I have kept cats for most of my life and have been fortunate to have had many good experiences with our feline friends.

There is one BIG but here.  Now that I don’t keep a cat I have got used to the freedom from responsibility that goes with pet keeping and also from the understanding that animals, and cats in particular, are very independent and also not very fussy about where they go to the toilet.  Now when I was a cat owner my cats never spent a penny (or worse) in our garden.  Clearly they went off and did their business elsewhere and so, I never worried about it. 

When my own cats had sadly died (both at a fine old age of 17 in both cases) I suddenly found myself on the receiving end of unwanted feline attentions!  Yes, with regular monotony some roaming moggy would deposit a large “message” slap bag in the middle of my lawn.  Now most times I would spot this and with some revulsion manage to remove it (why are these messes often too loose to handle!?) from the grass before I found myself on the receiving end of sprayed droppings when I had missed the “message” and mowed it with my rotary lawn mower.   I shudder at the vivid recollection of this smelly experience even after a 10 year gap.

To combat the cats that were doing this to me I spent a small fortune of a variety of chemical, so called repellents.  Sonic devices that the cats treated with utter disdain, simply wandering around the outer edges of the garden having somehow worked out the range of the particular device I had fitted.  In one miraculous event I saw next doors cat slide over the fence like a reptile rather than a cat and after a short bit of reconnaissance “Bob” literally “bunny hopped” over the invisible beam!!! £25 down the drain I muttered as I tossed the useless kit into the bin.  Mind you the first time I had installed it Bob’s first encounter was truly awful (for him) judging by his blood curdling caterwaul.  He certainly worked his way around the thing thereafter.

One day discussing my massive expenditure anti cat measures someone suggested to me that they had heard that if you filled several 2 litre clear plastic bottles with water and placed them strategically around your garden they would somehow deter cats from visiting your garden all together.  I viewed this suggestion with some scepticism but decided that it may be worth a try and given that it was free of any further expense, why did I have to lose.

Well, three bottles of water placed in the garden later, not a cat to be seen. 

Success!

PS:

I have now had to employ this practice again now that one or two cats have been calling here to stalk the birds that feed here.  Not while I am watching they wont be. 

Any other NON LETHAL ideas would of course be welcome.  Please feel free to post your ideas in the comments.

I have eye for the birds!

I never thought that expression “pulling a few birds” in retirement would be so easy given the number of visitors I am having at home right now.  All shapes and sizes and degrees of “friendliness” and all sorts of colours too.  OK, to be honest they are the feathered variety of birds but nonetheless they are welcome visitors given the time and effort that has gone onto attracting them to the garden.
So far we have seen three varieties of Tit, blue, common and coal, a Robin, a host of sparrows of course and at first a lone Starling.  At first we thought that this poor lonely looking Starling had got lost, was abandoned or had been brought up thinking it was a Sparrow.  So my plan to “discourage” it was put on hold which with the benefit of hindsight was a mistake as now we have six of the flaming things thrashing about among our little garden birds like a gang of thugs.
I tried all sorts of ways of deterring these unwelcome guests but somehow each time they managed to outwit me and take most, if not all, of the suet block I had put out for the tits etc.  I think I have found a partial solution now (omitting the Facebook suggestions I got involving my already discounted 12 bore and a new one, “get a Sparrow Hawk” ) which is to hang a peanut feeder ball that is not so attractive to the Starlings as they are rather ungainly in flight and find hanging or flying upside down somewhat difficult.  Added to this is a new cage type feed with tube for seeds in its centre.  So now I hang a square of suet in its small cage inside this larger bell shaped feeder cage.  This doesn't stop the Starlings feeding but it does limit the amount that they can take and they soon get bored and clear off.
These arrangements have not gone without problems though and I have been forced to go out in all weathers to re-hang the feeders, top up the peanuts, the suet block that has broken and scare off the cats that are sitting underneath the feed area in hopeful anticipation of a bird supper.
We have had some very funny moment watching the hapless and greedy Starlings, perched on a metal rod that keeps the inner suet block away from them, spinning round desperately trying to leap from the rod to the peanut feed ball that is hanging nearby.
Our highlight though this week was to see our first of now what has been several visits of this little colourful chap!

Meanwhile my efforts to thwart the starlings are almost as epic as the efforts I made a few years ago to deter the cats of the neighbourhood when they were using our garden as a cat public toilet and battle ground.  I spent a fortune on cat repellent potions, condensed lion dung and an electronic device that only worked once before I gave up on that little purchase.  The first night I installed it we had gone to bed and at about 10:30 I heard this blood curdling caterwaul indicating that the unfortunate cat from next door had triggered the device.  From then on “Bob” the cat from next door still came into the garden but walked all around the edges keeping his distance from the detector.  One day to our astonishment Bob came into the garden peered down the length of the lawn and then bunny hopped over the beam given off by the cat deterrent device!  I gave up after that and was shocked to learn form our paperboy that he was the one that could hear the painful subsonic sound given off by the device and it made him want to run away!   In the end the real and as it turned out the cheapest and most successful was the positioning of three or four 2 litre mineral water bottles half filled with water at strategic points in the garden.  These it seemed had the effect of “dazzling” the cats and deterring them from using our lawn as a toilet.
These days the cats are kept at bay by simple vigilance and a sharp clap of the hands but my latest attempt at blocking their route under the fence at the side of the house has caused a minor mystery which I think we may have solved.  The other day I laid all sorts of entanglements in the shallow dip under the fence knowing that the cats would not be bothered with trying to negotiate the tangled maze and would climb the fence if they wished but it would limit their access to the undergrowth directly under where the birds were feeding. Today I saw a cat shooting out of the garden using the old escape route and on investigation found that all the tangled branches and thorny twigs etc had been removed and the scrape made completely clear.  Now no human could have done this as the scrape is inaccessible to any path outside.  We think it is our old friend Mr Fox who has been along and cleared his pathway given that we blocked one of the three that featured in our garden when we moved in.  Clever devils foxes!

My New Lens

Having recovered from my rant about some insignificant individuals I am ready to tell you about my new camera accessory ...

Since moving into our new house and having finished the layout of our new garden I seem to have developed an interest in bird watching again, remember I had the same interest in Ibiza. Once more I make it clear that I am talking ornithology and not voyeurism when I speak about "bird watching".

Well, to attract the birds I got a peanut feeder, a very large bag of peanuts and a thing for holding blocks of lard. I have to say though that the birds visiting this garden are not allowed seeds. Why not you may wonder, well its because birds are messy eaters and the seeds get spread about the lawn and I have an extra job pulling the resulting weeds up every few days! So peanuts it is and what falls to the ground can be picked up by ground feeders. I have now also placed a nice block of fat with cranberry and peanuts ( shhhh and some seeds) into its receptacle and I am hoping that this will attract even more birds of varying types.

Now, just why am I entitling this blog "The New Lens"? Simples Aleksandr Orlov the world famous meerKat (Bloody spelling of that Meerkat word got me going!!) would say. The reason is that I want to branch out into some wildlife photography or some more long distance type of photographs where the subject will be unaware of my camera and will remain natural. To do this I spent the last several weeks selling all sorts of things on Ebay until I had raised enough cash to purchase my new Zoom Lens!

The lens was duly delivered in good order and I have already fitted it and taken myself off into the garden, the nearby hospital grounds and some open fields to discover the wildlife that inhabits these places. Sadly they all seem to have spotted me coming, laden down as I have been with tripod, carry case, camera and brightly coloured polo shirts and buggered off into the trees until I have passed.

I am going to have to develop a new plan and one that is based on stealth, choice of equipment and of course choice of suitable clothing. I suppose my City based "candid" shots will need less camouflage as all I will need to do is lurk in the City centre and point my Zoom lens at the unsuspecting public!

Mu current experimental photographs are not what I hoped for but I suppose I can always do some more stalking and lurking about and get some more... as I always say.... Watch this space!

ONE ATTEMPT AT SHOOTING GOODWOOD FROM CHICHESTER! (Click on the photo for more detail)



Oh and here's a little sample of what else you can do with a Digital Camera! I have called this little Stop Motion Animation "Evolution"



And finally a view looking over the downs below Goodwood