Pandemic Silence

 There's nothing like the silence of a pandemic.

Yesterday, bored, I went outside, because it wasn't raining, and the silence during the mid afternoon was epic.  I swear I could hear crickets chirping.  I heard no cars driving down the next street over, which is like a freeway in a way, with usually a low flunctuating roar of constant traffic.  For once, I heard no trains rocking and clanging on the tracks a few blocks from here.  I heard no voices, no children screaming or chattering, no yelling from the house behind me.  Just silence.

I wondered if something terrible had happened, like an attack somewhere, and went inside to check my phone for that.  Nothing.  

We have had a large number of COVID cases in our county the last week, with four or five more deaths in our county alone.  Maybe people are sobering to these statistics and staying home?  I don't know.

I put up my Christmas tree.  I had to brush cat hair out of it, lol.   That tree has been around a very very long time and I got it used to begin with!

I love my tree, the lights and ornaments.  I only put unbreakable ornaments on the tree for obvious reasons and tie it in three directions to keep the cats from taking it down.  They've been trying already, but so far, it still stands.

So I went to the park with my game cam, near dark, like usual now.  There's so little daylight.  By the time I get up, do all my chores, then have breakfast/lunch, which I combine after chores, then do a couple projects, its mid afternoon and the darkness is seeping in and the light fails so fast.

Game camming is my new hobby and I enjoy it tremendously.

I set up near one of the trails that goes up along the dike surrounding the park, then down into residential.  I'd cut the ends off an old piece of wood, so it was sharp, to strap the camera to, and thrown a hammer in the car and hammered the stake into the wet soggy ground.  

It took only a couple of blows.  The residential cats come and go down that trail into the park, when bored no doubt, as I had been, to visit with friends and go to the river and just be cats.  A couple came out into view, returning from a walk along the trail, but I heard their dog first, whom they were hastily leashing up.  I heard the man exclaim "There's a damn cat!" and thought "oh no".  But his wife followed and leaned over and put something from a reusable grocery bag down on the ground.

As she came by my car, I opened the door a bit and said, "Are you feeding the kitties?"  Yes, she admitted, I love them, she exclaimed, then proceeded to describe one after another, mostly residential owned cats, whom I'd gotten fixed, most years ago.  I told her some of their names.  She was happy.  

I gave her my card and told her what I do and what I was doing right now and she smiled.

There was another car parked next to me and I knew the car and soon enough the man, an incessant walker, came through the parking lot and we chatted.  He's a nice fellow and lives nearby.  This time we exchanged names, although I instantly forgot his as I'm no good with human names.  He drove off and by now it was difficult to see through the growing darkness and the cats began coming down the trail.  When its raining they don't show up so I was happy for no rain last night.  It's raining again this morning.  

Here are a few of the photos I got, and I only saved those of true park cats, although most now spend their time up at a particular friendly residence over the dike and down, where they are fed and have shelter.

Cumi, a fixed boy, now about 7 years old

TC, who was dumped just over a year back, at the park, and I got him fixed in late May.

Residential owned tabby by now elderly.  I got him fixed probably 8 or 9 years ago

Parker, another boy I got fixed last March.

That's Parker plus the new one I've seen lately, a long hair orange tux.  

The residents I've checked with don't think he's owned and I doubt it too.

I'll probably catch New Boy soon and take him to be fixed and vaccinated.  Nobody wants more kittens born in the brush.   I only stayed about an hour.  I'm sure I would have gotten more faces staring at me, on the game cam SD card had I been there a bit longer.

My next game camming adventure I think will be above the reservoirs along the river for the night.  I like it up there.  The darkness there is so complete.  Like a blanket.

I wish I'd had a game cam when that cat went missing, after her ownet overshot a sharp corner on Tombstone Pass and cascaded down an embankment with her cat in her car, whom she never saw again.  I went up four times looking for her but the first two times were useless as the woman herself gave me wrong information on where she'd wrecked and I only found out for the third trip from ODOT employees.  I used the white trash cam method instead, of putting out piles of cat food in a smoothed out area.  I could check these spots to see if food had been eaten and for the tracks of who had eaten it.   But I only saw two ravens who watched me closely those days up there.  No food was touched, if in spots the ravens didn't see, deep in the forest.  Then the last trip up I startled them, in the road, when I arrived one morning, a few hundred feet down the road from where the wreck had been, eating on entrails and maybe they belonged to the cat.  I raced back to shoo them off what was left but there wasn't much left to be able to tell what animal that may have once been.  However the spots of skin with hair attached matched that of the lost cat.