Adventures with wildlife #3

This morning the Rhino House is under attack. What appears to be hundreds of small birds keep lifting off simultaneously from the trees & flying around the house. Nothing too dangerous there it would seem, but the birds in these parts have some strange habits when it comes to life around the Rhino House.

Unusually for this part of the world, the Rhino House has a large numbers of oddly shaped windows, glazed doors & a floor-to-roof glass area that resembles nothing seen before on this planet. For some reason the smaller local birds seem to regard this as a challenge & regularly fling themselves at the glass resulting in either instant death or an extended period of stunned recuperation while struggling to sit upright on the terrace. This latter state would around most local houses, result in a handy supplement to the feline diet; around the Rhino House it merely distresses Buster, who chooses to try & hide until he can work out if the victim is stunned or dead. If the bird is dead he will often play with it for several minutes before forgetting what he is doing, if it is alive he will wait cautiously until it has flown-off.

This morning we had half-a-dozen bird strikes on the windows within an hour & Buster had taken to hiding under my desk, where he was trying to look unconcerned & appeared to be attempting to work out what his tail was for. An unusual but hardly dangerous morning I thought; then disaster struck. As one bird flew in through the front door (which I had opened earlier for Buster when he had forgotten how to step through the (open) cat flap) another came through the study window. Fortunately I was in the kitchen pouring tea (for myself, not for Buster) & so I was spared the immediate chaos of 2 possibly related birds meeting in the doorway to my study as Buster attempted to leave it via the open window.

Now Buster, you may recall if you have read “Adventures with wildlife” before, is not an agile cat & what he lacks in poise, balance & athleticism, is balanced by his unerring ability to miss anything he leaps at, onto or over. In this case the window was never going to be even a slight possibility, but he did manage to hit the shelves on a completely different wall, removing most of their contents to the floor & the birds into the kitchen – thus helping me to redecorate by throwing tea everywhere.

The birds are now sitting on the wall cupboard & the extraction hood in the kitchen & Buster is now settling down to sleep in the fridge (which I had opened before dropping the tea).

It’s going to be a long, long day.

Who are you? Where am I? Who am I? What’s for lunch?