Of killer cats and yapping dogs

(First published in The Dominion Post, January 6.)

My wife found it lying in the garden by the compost bin. It was hard to see, its mottled breast feathers providing perfect camouflage in the undergrowth.

It was a Californian quail, one of two that we’d become accustomed to seeing around the place. Sadly, nature hadn’t disguised it well enough to save it from one of the neighbourhood cats.

It could only have been a cat that killed it. As far as I’m aware, healthy quail are not in the habit of spontaneously lying down and dying.

Besides, the cats around our place have previous form. Two summers ago, our garden became home to another pair of quail.  They were welcome visitors and we did our best to make them feel at home.

Mr and Mrs Quail produced seven chicks.  We were proud of our quail family and felt like proxy parents. But then the inevitable happened.

I found the bodies of two quail chicks lying on the lawn. Of the rest of the family, there was no sign.

After several days, the adult birds reappeared by themselves. We assumed that cats had got all the chicks.

They would have killed out of instinct, not necessity.  The cats we see are well-fed and don’t need juvenile quail to supplement their diet.

Prior to this I’d harboured no ill-feeling toward cats. We don’t own one, but our section is treated as common ground by all the neighbours’ cats and we constantly see them around.

One took to lurking under the concealing foliage of a weeping Japanese maple, from where it would ambush any bird that came within striking distance. A pile of feathers on the lawn would tell the story.

I could tolerate that. One blackbird less, when our garden is overpopulated with them anyway, didn’t bother me. But the quail chicks were a different story.

At that point I began to have some sympathy for Gareth Morgan’s campaign for controls on domestic cats. But he’s got it only half right, because cats can be a pest for other reasons besides their blood lust.

We often encounter cat excrement in the garden. It’s not only foul-smelling, but potentially dangerous because it can transmit the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis.

My resent-o-meter was cranked up a further couple of notches recently when a cat started making itself comfortable at night on an outside settee. It left evidence of its sleepovers in the form of ineradicable stains on the cushions.

All this has left me feeling slightly jaundiced toward cats when previously I had no feelings about them one way or another. But what do you do? Cats are unique among domestic pets in that they defy normal means of control.

Unlike dogs, they are impervious to human commands. Paradoxically, we require dogs to be chained or otherwise confined, while cats enjoy licence to roam at will. Why the double standard?

One solution would be for cats to be kept in cages or hutches, like rabbits, but you can imagine the outcry that would provoke. Cats are one of those red-button issues – like 1080 and fluoridation – that reduce otherwise rational people to a state of borderline hysteria.

In any case I have to admit that, even with my hostile feelings toward the cats that kill our quail and soil our cushions, the dogs in our neighbourhood irritate me even more. And this from a dog lover.

Our neighbours’ dogs don’t have to come on to our property to drive me mad, and they never run loose. They just yap. And yap. And yap.

Some noises you can put up with. A lawnmower or chainsaw somewhere in the neighbourhood is acceptable because it’s serving a purpose, and you know it’s going to stop when the job’s finished.

No, the noises that set people’s teeth on edge are those that are avoidable, like boy-racers, Harley-Davidsons and yapping dogs.

These noises are a public nuisance and an invasion of privacy. But the yapping dogs in my neighbourhood pose a conundrum almost as vexing as that of how to control cats.

The conundrum is this. I like my neighbours and have a good relationship with them. They are exemplary in every respect but one.

The thing I’ve never worked out is how to tell them, without jeopardising neighbourhood harmony, that their dogs drive me mad.

I did once try shouting at the owner of one spectacularly noisy dog whose barking was disturbing the Sunday afternoon tranquillity. It was pitifully ineffective. The owner couldn’t hear me because of the noise his dog was making. 

Footnote: If part of this column seems familiar, it's because a couple of paragraphs originally appeared in a column written for the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard.

No partridge, and now no quail either

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 17.)

We had a sharp reminder last week of how merciless nature can be.

For several weeks my wife and I had been watching a pair of California quail that had taken up residence somewhere nearby and spent much of their time on our property.

It’s unusual to see quail in an urban environment (we live in the middle of town) and we assumed they were living in the reserve beyond our back fence.

They were very welcome visitors and we did our best to make them feel at home. California quail strike me as benign interlopers. They don’t seem to compete directly with native species for food, they don’t (unlike magpies) harass other birds and they don’t (unlike another Australian immigrant, the spur-winged plover) disturb the peace with raucous calls.

As time went by the quail, which are extremely wary birds, seemed to get used to our presence. For our part, we felt oddly flattered that they felt at home at our place. We hoped that in due course they would appear with a clutch of chicks.

We still assumed they were domiciled somewhere else. Then, a couple of weekends ago, my wife came across their nest as she was clearing undergrowth around the base of a gleditsia tree in the middle of our lawn.

All this time they had been under our noses. Remarkably, they hadn’t been deterred by the roar of the motor mower passing only a metre away.

We fretted that the birds might abandon the nest once their cover was blown, but no; the female resolutely stayed put. The male remained close by, keeping a vigilant eye out for predators.

About a week ago, we were rewarded with the sight we’d been hoping for. Mr and Mrs Quail appeared on the lawn leading seven balls of fluff so tiny that initially it was hard to see them.

We took an irrational pleasure in seeing these comical creatures scrambling to keep up with their parents as they explored the garden, but now we had a new reason to be anxious.

Being ground nesters, quail are highly susceptible to predators. I imagine that’s the reason they typically produce quite large clutches of chicks – sometimes 20 or more. The more chicks, the better the chance that at least some will survive.

Quail chicks also develop very quickly. They can leave the nest with their parents within 24 hours of hatching and can fly (well, as much as quails ever fly) within 10 days. But those 10 days were going to be critical.

We don’t own a cat but some of our neighbours do, and we regularly see them on our section. I’ll sometimes come up across a telltale scattering of feathers indicating one of these hunters has made a kill. (You can see where this is going, can’t you?)

We quickly became accustomed to the sight of the quail family roaming our section, the chicks growing visibly bigger by the day. We felt like proud proxy parents.

But when there was no sighting for 24 hours, I went looking. It didn’t take long. On the lawn, just a metre from our deck, I saw what I’d hoped not to see: two mangled, bloodied corpses, neatly laid almost on top of each other.

My first impression, from their long legs and surprisingly mature plumage, was that I was looking at the two adult birds. It was almost a relief to realise, on closer investigation, that they were chicks. It was amazing how quickly they had grown.

Of their parents and siblings, there was no sign. We could only hope they had escaped. Even if they had survived, we thought it unlikely that we would see them back. They would now regard our place as a danger zone.

In fact the two adults briefly re-appeared after an absence of several days, but we haven't seen them since. There was no sign of their chicks. Perhaps they were being kept in hiding, but it’s more likely that cats got the whole lot.

We all know this is how nature operates, but it’s a brutal lesson when it strikes so close to home.

Does it make me want to shoot the neighbours’ cats? No. Cats do what they’re biologically programmed to do, which is hunt and kill. But it has certainly made me more sympathetic to Gareth Morgan. I’ve been ambivalent about the presence of cats on our property in the past, but I’ll be observing a zero tolerance policy now.

Until a few days ago, I’d been toying with the idea of writing a last column before Christmas on the theme that while we don’t have a pear tree, still less a partridge, nature had given us a present in the form of that quail family. Unfortunately this is not that column.

It’s hard to explain why the birds brought us such pleasure. They just did. We can only hope the adults will try again, and that this time some chicks will survive.