The Cat Food Caper

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I started putting food out for a neighbor's cat after noticing one day while I was petting him that he was very skinny. Figuring a hungry cat is going to bring more hell on birds than a full cat, I decided to put out a little kibble in what passes for my back yard. 

The skinny cat's name is Ren. He's black-and-white and full of personality. Often when the neighbors take their frisky young German shepherd for a walk, Ren follows them. And I don't mean for just a few steps. He'll follow them on a long walk around the neighborhood, ducking for cover here and there, then catching up again. Sometimes the dog will playfully pounce toward Ren, and Ren will return the pounce, taking no guff. If Ren encounters someone else walking their dog down the sidewalk, he sits on his haunches and stares them down. The dog-walker usually crosses the street to pass. I watched out my living room window late one night as Ren did the same thing with a huge raccoon. They had a quick boxing match before going their separate ways.

So back when I started doing this I put the trail camera out back to see if Ren would find and eat the cat food. I found that he did in fact find and eat it, and on a couple of occasions he would even be waiting for me when I set it out in the morning. However, two other neighborhood cats also got in on the free lunch -- a small, short-haired black cat, and a large, long-haired gray cat. (Squirrels and birds seemed to ignore the cat food.) Using the clock on the trail camera, I took notes on when each cat showed up. Ren and the black cat came by every day, usually multiple times. The long-haired cat showed up too rarely to set a pattern, but Ren and the black cat invariably came during the day, probably because their owners let them inside at night.

Any cat food left out overnight became fair game for rats and raccoons. Ren didn't like other critters eating his food, so he started scooping sand and leaves on it after he was done. That was making a mess, so I started putting the food in my other neighbor's yard, which is just a slab of concrete. (There's a tall fence separating my yard from Ren's yard, but nothing between me and the concrete yard.) After seeing the night action, I put out only as much chow in the morning as the cats could completely eat during the course of the day.

Just on a whim, I decided the other day to start putting the food back in my yard, laying it out on a stepping stone. I was surprised to come home from work to see the pile still there. I checked it again in the morning and it was all gone. I noticed I hadn't seen my neighbors in a few days and figured they might have gone on vacation, and that would explain Ren's absence. But I don't know where the black cat lives and thought it was strange that the food would remain uneaten all day. I did not believe the rat would eat that much so I set my trail camera out there to see what was going on. Why was the food being left uneaten all day? Where were Ren and the black cat?

When I went out to check the camera after work, I saw that most of the cat food had been eaten. Usually it is all gone, so I knew something unusual was still going on. 

Well, the camera found out. The night life was having a party. Ren might indeed be wherever his owners put him when they go out of town, but the black cat had obviously been gone to get medical care. You'll see in the last frame of the video that he walks right past the chow before coming back and finally spotting it. He usually shows up early in the morning, but he didn't show up this time until just after noon, and he didn't return later for seconds, which is why there was still some food left.

My trail camera has been sitting in a drawer since the water hole on Mt. Tam dried up. I was glad to find a use for it by uncovering a back yard mystery.

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Aug. 21 follow-up (Ren returns):

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Black & White

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Spirals

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"The unique properties of the Golden Rectangle provides another example. This shape, a rectangle in which the ratio of the sides a/b is equal to the golden mean (phi), can result in a nesting process that can be repeated into infinity — and which takes on the form of a spiral. It's call the logarithmic spiral, and it abounds in nature."

--George Dvorsky, Gizmodo

While my wife hunts for sea glass along the shoreline, I'm usually drawn more to the beach pebbles. I'm attracted to the variety of colors and patterns, and to holding one in my hand and knowing that each one is the expression of physical processes that may have begun deep in the earth or deep in the ocean. We gathered these stones on Rodeo Beach. I placed them on the sand and enjoyed the colors but didn't care for the shape I'd made. My wife rearranged them into this spiral.

Also found along the beach were these varied hues of layered serpentine, chert and other minerals. The original image is 24x53 inches. Shot with 105mm lens, I focus-stacked each vertical frame, then stitched the six resulting frames into a panorama.

My favorite stone was this interesting little pebble with patches of what I thought at first glance might be rose-colored quartz. Looking at it under a 10X hand lens, though, the reddish color looks like it could be embedded chert. In any event I enjoy the complexity of its construction and thinking about its formation over perhaps millions of years. (Then again, if you think about it, everything from the pebble to the fingers that picked it up off the beach, began to form at the very beginning of time itself.)

I photographed the pebble in a small abalone shell that brought me back to my wife's spiral on the beach and to thoughts of a nautilus shell she has at home. The nautilus is often used to describe the correlation between the Golden Ratio in art and architecture, and Fibonacci numbers in mathematics -- places where spirals are found.

The spiral is an interesting shape, expressed in nature from molluscs to galaxies, in art from petroglyphs to Andy Goldsworthy. Water spirals down the drain in our sink and spins into hurricanes over the ocean. Spirals occurred in sacred form from the Celts to the Aztecs. They are hardwired into our DNA and even occur, in a manner of speaking, in the depths of our psyche.

"The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic it is to define a center.... The development of these symbols is almost the equivalent of a healing process. The center or goal thus signifies salvation in the proper sense of the word."

--Carl Jung from Psychology and Alchemy

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