Category: Cats (page 7 of 8)

Neither Minstrel or her kittens came by yesterday.  We think they were frightened off by the Javelina that had visited the night before.  But, for a time this morning, both the mamma and daddy cat were here along with three kittens.

The daddy cat is quite tolerant of the kittens.  He doesn’t like it when Callisto – who is probably his offspring too – comes outside.  She used to try to go up and greet him, but he growls and she backs off.

The gray kitten with white markings has very big ears!

The one remaining ginger kitten.  We had seen a second one when Minstrel starting bringing them by, but it disappeared soon thereafter.

Here are the two grays playing with each other:

Minstrel and her kittens came by last night somewhat before it started to rain.  They played vigorously for a while and then three of them climbed one of the pillars on the patio to get up out of the wet and away from predators too.

It’s amazing that three of them fit on that pillar.  Tiger and Callisto take up pretty much the entire space by themselves.

This shot was taken from inside, through the glass of the patio door, manually focused, using only the patio lights.  I ended up setting my NEX-7 at ISO 6400 and had the lens all the way out at 200mm.  The aperture was f/6.3 and the shutter speed was 1/20s.  It took me several tries at processing the RAW file to get an acceptable result.  The out-of-camera JPEG file was actually pretty good.  For a while, I was considering using it, but persevered until I found some RAW file processing settings that looked somewhat better.

Minstrel’s latest litter of kittens are starting to visit.  They’re very skittish – it’s difficult to even catch a glimpse of them.  I managed to get this photo from my balcony earlier today with the lens at 200mm (maximum zoom).  Even though I was a good ways off, it was still suspicious of me.

Marie tells me that she’s seen four kittens.  Two are ginger colored, one is grey, and I think she said the other was black and white or perhaps dark grey and white.

Minstrel is also Molly‘s mom and Callisto‘s aunt.

The photo below is from June of 2010.  Callisto still lived outside then.  Her mom, Calico, tried to ditch that recent litter of kittens as best as she could, but Callisto was persistent and followed mom around, even sleeping with her at times on the patio.

We managed to coax her inside a couple of months later.  She made loud and very nervous yowling noises when I shut the door and she realized that she couldn’t get out.  Marie felt bad for her and insisted that we open the door so that she could leave again.  But we tried again several days or perhaps a week later and kept her in to stay.

Joe took Callisto and Molly (whom he usually calls “Kitten” or “Squirrel”) out to the balcony.  They (briefly) spent some time together on the same platform.  Callisto later jumped down to the roof.  We don’t have to worry about Molly wanting to explore the roof; she kept escaping back into my office each time I opened the door to take a photo.

McGonagall rarely goes outside, but today I managed to catch her and bring her out to the balcony where I placed her on the piece of cat furniture that Joe and I built.  She was a good cat and stayed on top of the furniture.  All of the other cats want to go out on the roof when I bring them out to the balcony.  Tiger figured out that I had the balcony door open and let himself into my office while McGonagall was out there.  I had to shoo him out and then lock the door.