The barn cats

 No matter how early I get up in the morning... sometimes it's as early as four o'clock... Jakie is waiting at the back door (the only door we use in this house) for his breakfast.  I apologize for the poor quality of the videos here, but I used the Ipad instead of the camera because I don't have to wait so long for Youtube to process them.  On this first one I forgot I had it set for video instead of a snapshot, so you have a two-second video.  But you get the picture.  I often wonder if he spends the whole night huddled against the door, or if perhaps he stays on the front porch until he hears us stirring around.  It's seven degrees right now, and there's a barnful of hay the cats could hole up in, but they hang around the house as usual until breakfast is served.

I only have the two barn cats now, Mama Kitty and her son Jake.  Since the weather turned cold, they are eating twice as much as they were before.  I like to feed them early in the morning, because I want their pan empty by nightfall.  Anything left overnight is likely to be eaten by raccoons, opossums  rats, or skunks.  

I pour their cat food into an pan, and they both start eating like they're starved.  But then Jakie will crowd his mom out with his big old tomcat head, and she's left looking at me as if to say, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"

Yesterday I placed an old dirty bowl next to the pan, thinking Mama Kitty might have a better chance if she had her own serving.

     

But Jake just goes back and forth between the two containers of food as though he thinks one might be tastier than the other.  And his mother looks up at me as if to say, "Can you believe this kid?"    

Just so you know, they have a heated water dish near their food.  It would be nice if the chickens had it so good, but there's no electricity at the henhouse.  So when it's bitter cold like this, I make three or four trips daily with hot water to thaw the ice for them.