Day 23b - Intruder Alert!

Bright Eyes

This is a special bonus edition.   It's not an image from today, but it does relate to a story I promised to follow up on.

If you've been following, you'll remember the recent spate of cat fights.   Maisie was beaten up quite badly a couple of weeks ago, and Loz got into a scrap last week.   Both times it was late in the evening and we didn't see the perp', so I decided to try to catch a photo of him.

So last Saturday, I put the trail camera outside to try to catch the culprit.  I put it right outside the front door, facing across the garden.  

The problem was, the camera was on high motion sensitivity, and there is some vegetation about 1m in front of the camera.   It was set to take 3 photos when triggered, 1 second apart.

Of course, it was windy, so between 12pm and 5pm, it took 1000 virtually identical photos.

The reason I know that they're virtually identical is because I had to look through them!

Yep, I had to look through all of them.  One by one.  Relentlessly...

In fact, the camera had taken 1602 photos in 24 hours when it ran out of space on the 2GB memory stick.  

I had to sit and look through them to find a dozen or so each of Loz, Jazz and Maisie, and half a dozen of this cheeky chap.  

And he is bold!   The image above was taken at 10pm on Saturday night, but he also came by earlier on, around tea time;

Here he's nosing up to the catflap.  Both these times he passed, the house was noisy...earlier in the evening I was Xboxing, and late on we had friends round and were chatting away in the lounge. 

I'm really intrigued to see whether he tries to come in during the day, or if there's a pattern to his visits.

So I've put the camera back out with an 8GB memory card in, and motion sensitivity set to normal...

Oh, and for the potentially confused amongst you, the black panther crouched by the shed (a jaguar in this case I think, panthera pardus) isn't a real one, so don't go getting all excited...there have been sightings of large black cats near here, but it wasn't him!

As for why there's a fake black panther hiding in the undergrowth in my garden...well, it's just because that's where he lives!  Obviously.

Back on topic - for more developments in the interloper story, watch this space...