One of the windows on the party porch is losing its netting. The strip of rubber that holds the netting into the screen has come loose, and the netting has curled down to one side. I keep forgetting when I'm out in the yard to attend to it. During the past few days, around happy hour, a lizard appears in the netting. He's not trapped. He knows how to get in and out. He's there to catch bugs. The cats noticed him, too. They know about window glass, but they still try to paw at him from inside the porch.
Yesterday a funny thing happened. The cats were waiting for the lizard to appear. They waited near the window, because now the lizard had appeared for several days in a row at the same time of day, they expected him. Sure enough, about ten or fifteen minutes later, the lizard was there. Cats are master scholars of recognizing and enforcing routines. At two o'clock, especially on the weekends when they hurry through breakfast so they can go outside, they start watching me and chirping that it's time for dinner, which is usually around four o'clock.
Another regular event occurred today. I was looking out of the window at the back yard, and there in the abelia bush was a little brown bird. I caught a flash of yellow at the neck. A juvenile great crested flycatcher. Every year the juveniles who have fledged from the tall trees in the back yard come down to the back of the house and look in the windows at us. They are curious. Then they remember, oh, right, I'm an arboreal bird, and they fly back up into the tree tops.
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