This Is A Crime Scene...

Last week I noticed a bundle of black feathers lying on a patch of our lawn. We have an indoor/outdoor cat and prowls all night and seeing a bunch of feathers in the yard is a somewhat normal occurrence. Feathers, fur, rabbits feet, once--a bat...we've seen it all, the evidence of carnage unleashed from our "domesticated" cat.

So, when I saw the feathers, I looked for signs of the bird's demise. There are birds in the area the cat will not bother (and some big birds that bother the cat...). He won't go after magpies, or crows, and since these feathers were dark and I didn't see any "innerd," I thought maybe the cat had wrestled with the bird, but it got away. I hoped it did, anyway.

However, when I mowed the lawn Saturday, I found the remains of a bird--it definitely did not get away. It was only then that I knew what kind of bird it was. A few weeks ago we saw some young chickens in my neighbor's yard. They were larger than chicks, but not fully grown, and I came to the realization that our cat had picked off one of the chickens. 

When we first saw the chickens, I wondered if they had a home or a pen to go into at night. I didn't think so because usually if someone wants to raise chickens in our neighborhood, they're in their pens all the time, especially living on a mountain like we do. There's all sorts of trouble for chickens where we live. So I hoped they would be big enough to give the cat some trouble if he decided he was peckish. 

Apparently not.

So, we have fewer chickens in the neighborhood. I feel bad for the bird. I would have like to see it get big. Then again, I don't really feel bad eating fried chicken (which I had done an hour before I mowed the lawn...). And cats gotta be cats. Hopefully the others can grow bigger and become a little mean. Time will tell.