About 8 weeks ago, a feral cat appeared at our house. In and of itself, the arrival of a strange cat is not unusual in our neck of the woods. Every six months or so we spy a wayward feline making his or her way through our property, only to disappear a few days later. What was unusual about this wayward cat is that it didn't move on. For three straight weeks, we would get brief glimpses of it patrolling past the house, pouncing on crickets in the tall grass, or lounging in the sun on the driveway.
Once it became clear that it had no intentions of heading for greener pastures, I decided I would have to intervene. While I was reluctantly willing to tolerate one wild cat living in our woods, hunting, dismembering and consuming our beloved birds and squirrels, I could not allow an eventual family of wild cats making my home their home. So I did some reading on how to trap-neuter-release (known as TNR) feral cats.
According to the TNR experts, the first thing you must do is get the wild critter accustomed to coming to the same place at the same time each day for a little bit of food. Once that routine has been established, you set up a trap cage that will allow you to capture and transport the whirling dervish to and from a vet who has agreed to perform the neutering. After the procedure, you release the cat in the same place it was captured, and it goes back to its feral cat life but without the ability to make more feral cats. So there you have it...I was now ready to put my TNR plan into action and I commenced with step 1: feeding.
Okay, okay, as you might have guessed, it only took a couple of feedings before this wild and crazed creature figured out that food comes from the nice lady as long as you look cute and a little pathetic and allow her to pet you once in a while. Within three days of our first one-on-one encounter, he was (literally) eating out of my hand, totally content being picked up and kissed on the head and crammed into a tiny carrier and riding in the car and flirting with the vet and having his nails clipped and being stuck with needles and having his blood drawn and gagging on the nasty de-worming medicine. And within a week of our first encounter, he was coming inside the house, snoozing on the furniture, using the litter box and sleeping with us at night. And within two weeks, he had a name: Roscoe.
Eight weeks have passed since this bundle of strawberry-blond fur chose our home to settle down in. All of us here in our little ecosystem - especially our chipmunks, who serve as an endless source of entertainment - have had to make some adjustments in order to accommodate each others' idiosyncrasies. Our balance has been thrown off a bit.
But change and balance are two concepts I've come to embrace living out here in the woods. Every event, every action, has a ripple effect throughout the system, necessitating a constant re-balancing. A hawk snatches a bird from the feeder. I accidentally run over a frog with the car. A tree falls across the driveway. A feral cat shows up at my door. I think Roscoe's unexpected arrival was Nature's way of reminding me how interdependent all of Her creatures really are.
