David McCreath

Earlier this year, as the snow was melting and the sun was starting to stay out longer, our cat Naboo started his annual agitating to go out in the back yard. Last year we installed a cat door in the back screen so he could go in and out and not bug us. It worked well for us and for him (and for Lola, who’s small enough to fit through the door), but not so well for the neighborhood birds. It turns out that Naboo is an incredibly adept hunter.

Like most animals who don’t actually *depend* on their hunting skills, he’s not perfect, but he’s better than any cat I’ve ever owned. I think his skill is in the stalking and the speed. Veerrrry sneaky and like furry greased lightning when he goes for the kill. While we really love watching animals be themselves and live up to their potential, we also don’t want the backyard turned into a killing field. And while the odds are slim, we don’t want Naboo killing a bird infected with avian flu. More about this at the end of the post.

So Katie asked me if we could build an enclosure for him with a cat door leading from the house so he could go in and out on his own. We talked about a few different places we could put it, originally thinking it would be in the back yard. Ultimately, though, we decided that wouldn’t be the best because that’s where the dogs are, and even though Lola couldn’t care less where the cat is, Bolleke still has moments of looking hungrily at him, especially when he’s romping like prey through the back yard.

One day we realized we’d been overlooking the best place of all. Right outside our bedroom window, there’s a giant evergreen that’s easily fifty feet tall and estimated to be eighty to a hundred years old by the tree guy. We had some of the lower branches removed last year to bring the skirt up off the lawn, so there’s easily room for me stand under it. As it turns out, we had room to build a 6’ long x 4’ wide x 6’ tall enclosure, with a cat door in one on of the bedroom windows.

After some fits and false starts, we finally got it done. We used green cedar two-by-fours for the frame and standard chicken wire. I made the door out of cedar fence planks. It took a little convincing to get Naboo through the door the first time, but now he’s very much into it. He doesn’t hang out in it for hours on end, but he’ll go out there a couple of times a day. We plan to build a little veranda for him that actually goes out from under the tree’s skirt so he can lie in the sun, but haven’t had time to do it yet.

Oh, yeah. The bird thing. A couple of weeks after we’d built it and gotten him going out on his own, he was sitting on the bed in the morning with Katie, who hadn’t gotten up. He started agitating to go out (the blinds were still down over his cat door), so Katie pulled up the blind and Naboo *shot* out the door and Katie almost immediately heard a little scuffle. She looked out the cat door just in time to see Naboo headed back *with a dead bird in his mouth*. She jammed her hand against the cat door while we tried to figure out how to get the bird away from him, during which time he was pushing against the door with his head as hard as he could. Finally we just let him in and chased him down to the basement and took the bird away from him.

It was a crazy perfect storm of bird killing: a bird small enough to fit through the chicken wire had done so for some reason, the bedroom was quiet enough for the cat to hear the bird in the enclosure, and he was fast and quiet enough to get through the cat door to kill the bird. It hasn’t happened since, but Naboo is definitely more interested in the possiblities of his kitty den.