Fusedale Bainbridge- Little Bugger

[snorkel_maiden]

Yes, looks so innocent, doesn't he? Just a cute fluffball playing with some tissue paper. Hmmm... not so much. This was our hall on Saturday:



He'd brought in a blackbird and apparently tortured it for some time. We couldn't find the body, so spent a good 40 minutes or so clearing up feathers (which don't go up the hoover very well), tiny spots of bird blood and small piles of over-excited cat sick. Tom then went to tidy the kitchen and suddenly yelled with shock because the very alive and highly frantic blackbird was sitting in the midde of the pile of washing up panting at him. After a couple of seconds of deep breathing to get over the shock, we shood it out of the kitchen window while it did what scared birds do all over the washing up, the kitchen sink and the window. It flopped down onto the patio and took refuge behind a flower pot.

Now I technically know what to do with injured birds to end their suffering- I've seen it done, although I've never done it myself. So I went through a brief existential crisis while working out what to do with it. I couldn't summon up the courage to 'deal' with it and besides, we weren't even sure at that point how injured it was, so we went onto the RSPCA website and discovered that their advice is to put the bird in a box and take it to your local vet. So we found a box and went outside to catch it again, at which point it took off and flew confidently away over our shed roof, and I heaved a big sigh of relief.

Now, fast forward to this morning. Fuzz had his breakfast and yelled at me a bit, as he tends to do in the mornings, and then disappeared outside. I saw him go and sit on the low wall just to the side of the fence in this picture, and stare maniacally upwards at the top of the fence.



And I immediately wondered and suggested to Tom that that's how he caught the bird on Saturday- waiting for them to come and land on the top of the fence. Thinking no more of it for a while, I went upstairs to get dressed and then heard a noise that sounded exactly like a cat scaling a fence vertically and then clumsily falling down again with something in it's mouth. I raced downstairs and yelled to Tom to go and shut the cat flap, which he did with alacrity especially considering he was only wearing a towel at the time. Sure enough Fuzz had caught another blackbird and was extremely annoyed that he couldn't bring it inside. But then in moving around he released his grip for just long enough that in an explosion of feathers the bird got away, and he sat and washed himself for a minute because of course he meant to let it go.

Cute fluffball? More like evil bird killing monster! Although I do have a certain amount of respect for his plan of attack and immaculate execution of it, and when he comes inside afterwards and purrs at me I can't stay annoyed with him for long! But I am dreading what I'll find when I get home this evening!