Our outdoor cats

Recently (well, it's actually been more than a month ago), we have adopted some outdoor cats. First, there was a mother with 2 kittens that David began feeding. One of the kittens, a very skittish black one, seems to have disappeared, so we presume that he didn't make it. The other kitten looks like an almost exact duplicate of her (well, we think it's a female) mother, so we named her "Mini-Me". The mother's name is Beatrix.

Not long after, another cat began hanging around. She has medium-length black hair with only a very few individual white hairs on her. At first, we thought she was a male, but we very soon realized that she was female. We called her "Blackie", and she is by far the least afraid of humans. She let us pet her from the beginning, and now she'll even let us pick her up. She purrs like crazy, and she likes to sit on the window sills and meow at us through the screens.

Beatrix and Mini-Me, on the other hand, are very short-haired gray and white tabbies with some white spots on them, but they won't even let us touch them. They're friendly otherwise, though, and they're both very elegant cats with beautiful, big, piercing eyes.

The last cat to join the group is a male yellow tabby named "Tz'hovi". He was so timid at first that he was afraid to even eat next to the others. To make matters worse for him, there is another male cat, whom we named "Spot", who comes around sometimes and cozies up readily to us humans but who is very mean to the other cats, especially to Tz'hovi. Now, whenever I see Spot, I shoo him away, which is not very easy to do. Sometimes, I have to physically push him with my feet, but he does eventually take off. Gradually, Tz'hovi has become less timid, and today he even let me pet him quite a bit. He's really a sweet cat!

Each morning, just before we eat breakfast, I take the sack of cheap cat food that we get at the supermarket and go out onto the front porch. I use a yogurt cup to measure, putting one cup in one area and a 2nd cup in another area a short distance away. Then I return to the 1st pile and add a 2nd cup to it, after which I also add a 2nd cup to the 2nd pile. All these aforementioned cats, of course, eat greedily, often alternating piles. Flying insects also show up immediately, probably some kind of wasps, and the ants also arrive before the cats even finish eating. By the time the cats are all satisfied, nearly every piece of remaining food has ants swarming all over it. But the cats really enjoy the food, and we enjoy watching them eat. We also keep an eye out to make sure that Spot and a dog from the neighborhood named Shawn don't come along, scare the cats away, and begin eating the food themselves.