My cat Athena is very unhappy with me...

[Fresh_Start]

Athena is about 8 and not a limber and fast as she used to be.
She's in indoor/outdoor kitty.
However, we saw a bold fox yesterday and decided to keep her close ... like in the house today.

And she has been whining and hissing at our other indoor cats.
She is very unhappy.

So after listening to her complain for hours...I decided to let her into the back yard.
I opened the door and let her out and immediately heard chattering.
I hadn't noticed a family of quails on the patio.

She immediately chased a baby quail under the barbeque.
Another baby settled into the grass and pretended it was a rock.
The mom and dad were chattering up a storm.

So...I gathered her up and put her back into the house.
And went in myself to give the family time to regroup.
I had only seen 2 parents and 2 babies.

A while later I was heading out to water the berries and found the family again in the yard.
Now I could see that there were 7-8 babies.

If you don't know quails the parents are about the size of the palm of your hand.
The babies fluffed out are the size of a small walnut.

The backyard is terraced and has stairs.
But the babies couldn't hop up the stairs to follow their parents.
My husband decides to help...no idea what he thought he was doing.
But he scared the babies under the pool cover.

I went to look for a board to give the babies a ramp to climb up the stairs.
So eventually all but one of the babies climb the ramp and the family disappears but one baby retreated to the pool cover. So we carefully opened the pool cover to recover the baby.
But by now the family had disappeared.

So we put the baby in a box and start searching for the family.
No immediate luck

Eventually the baby starts singing in the box.
So we carry the baby outside to see if it would call to its parents.
And we eventually find that they took shelter under the platform by the raised beds.

One of the parents comes out and we are able to reunite the family.

Relief.

I finish watering and go back inside.

in a while we decide to go swimming (its in the 90s).
And once again the quail family is by our back door between the house and the pool.

Once again the babies scatter.
The parents try to distract us.

Most of the babies go to the left around the corner of the house.
But one baby goes right...
And all three of my cats are at the window drooling.

So back I go inside to allow the family to reconnect.
Eventually the baby starts singing and the parents come to collect it.

The quails are good parents but herding quail babies is worse that herding cats.

I'm exhausted just thinking about what they go through trying to keep their babes alive.

Meanwhile I know the fox (probably more than one are still here) literally feet from where the quails took shelter by the raised beds.

And my Athena is still angry about being kept inside.

[Laffy Kat]

1. It's a jungle out there. nt

[drray23]

2. i think athena will do fine.

We had many cats and some were like her. When they got older we would keep them home and they transformed into house cats. After a few weeks you could not pry them off the sofa or bed.. They came to appreciate comfort and warmth in their old age.

[Fresh_Start]

5. She currently has the best of both worlds.

She has a warm bed to sleep in but a lot of freedom to roam.

She's a tabby so I think that makes her especially territorial.

[radical noodle]

3. What a nice story!

Hope the fox stays away from the quail.

[Fresh_Start]

4. thank you

I never share stuff like this but I was so awestruck with the persistence of the quail parents...that I wanted to do something to recognize it.

[radical noodle]

6. I needed that story tonight!

Animals are simply amazing. Sometimes I think humans were simply a mistake of nature, we've screwed things up so much.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. Thank you, that was a fascinating story.

One winter, we had a quail visitor that would show up on the porch. We tried plugging in a light bulb for warmth and we got special quail food for him, too. He was around for quite awhile.

[blaze]

8. When my mom lived in Tucson,

I loved when my visits coincided with a new batch of quail!! She had a bunch of bird feeders just outside the back window and it was so much fun to watch those tiny little things scurrying around.

[mnhtnbb]

9. What a great story.

We just adopted two 9 year old cats who had been surrendered by their owner to a local county animal shelter. They have been house cats
their entire lives and show no interest in wanting to go outside, but they both do enjoy going out on our screened deck.

Years ago we had another pair of kitty brothers. As they aged, one really didn't want to go outside, but the other did. After Mouse died (the one who liked to go out) we didn't have the heart to make Simba go out anymore without his brother to go with him and he very rarely asked to go out.

We had a fox this winter that was hiding out under the deck on the front of the house. Twice when I opened the door early in the morning to take
our dog out for her walk, the fox darted out from under the deck.

[hibbing]

10. I loved this story n/t