Cats, Hens, and Deer

Posted on March 31, 2026 by TJ

It is a gloomy, rainy day today. The gloom is constant, the rain is not. It mostly just drips with an infrequent distant rumble of thunder. It’s just rainy enough that it’s a good day to write.

EJ has a co-worker that keeps urging him to get another dog. But EJ says that he doesn’t just miss having “a dog,” he misses having Hannah Joy. I feel the same. After having Hannah, we aren’t sure we will ever be ready for another dog. If we ever do, it won’t be for a while.

Hannah’s absence has definitely changed the cats’ behavior. Timmy spends most of his time on the bed. At night he usually sleeps at the foot of my side of the bed. If I disturb him, he stomps up to my face–walking ON me–to voice his complaint with irritated grumbles. He sometimes tries to get under the blankets, but I won’t let him because he’s fussy and doesn’t settle down. He acts so much as if the bed is his own little kingdom that I asked Grok (X’s AI) to turn my photo of him into a short video:

EJ wakes at 4 a.m. to get ready for work and I always get up with him. On his days off, we’d like to sleep in a bit, but the cats–mostly Timmy, Clara, and Solveig–are used to me feeding them as soon as I get up and they demand to be fed at their usual time. They jump on us, using our stomachs as trampolines, run up and down our bodies, and do whatever they can to get us up. It’s impossible to sleep. They remind me of the tactics my siblings and I used to wake our parents up on Christmas mornings when we were children. We would wake in the wee hours of the morning–2 or 3 o’clock–and start noisily clomping up and down the stairs, we’d turn Christmas music up LOUD, anything to wake our parents up. It wouldn’t take long for t hem to shout, “Go back to bed or you won’t be opening your parents until 7, or 8, or 9 o’clock!” We’d all scurry back to bed, but a few minutes later we’d be back to trying to wake them up. They always gave up after a few tries, but they got their revenge by insisting they had to wake up with a cup of coffee, which they drank verrrryyyy slowly. Our inside cats are like that.

We are making continuous progress at befriending our feral garage cat, whom we named Harvey. We adopted him in mid-November. It took about two months before we saw more than a brief glimpse of him. Gradually he came closer and closer to me when I went out to feed him and Theo in the mornings. Now he is now so affectionate with me that when I go into the garage, he comes right up to me me (most of the time) and purrs when I pet him. So now we are working on Harvey accepting EJ. When the weather permanently warms up and we open the pet door so the cats can go outside, we don’t want Harvey fearful of EJ. At first EJ went out with me to feed the cats on his days off. Harvey would shyly peek around the workbench but not come near. This last weekend I thought it might be better if EJ went out alone to feed the cats. He tried it, and Harvey came up to sniff his fingers. So we are having success. Our patience is paying off.

One of our hens is broody. Likely two are broody. Possibly three. Two of the hens are each in separate nesting boxes. The third alternates squeezing in with one or the other of them. They are all rather irritable and growl a warning if I stick my hand in the box before they peck angrily at me. The hens are all the Partridge Chanteclers that we bought as chicks from the farm store last year. Chanteclers were originally bred in Canada so we call them “The Canadians.” I have no idea how many chicks will end up hatching. We might have an over-abundance of chicks.

Twice over the years I’ve seen a fawn with its mother shortly after it was born. Both times it was in the same place on the eastern hill. So I’ve moved my trail camera to watch that hill in hopes that I will see a doe giving birth there. I was careful with the location: I want to put the camera close enough to get a good view, but not so close that my going up to switch batteries and SD cards scare off the doe. The does seem to give birth in May or early June so I figure I have at least a month to decide on a good location.

With warmer temperatures and today’s rain, the snow is once again almost all melted. I’ve seen little buds forming on the lilac bushes and some plants poking their heads out of the dirt. We’ve also seen robins, which are Michigan’s harbinger of Spring. In fact, a couple days ago EJ and I saw a flock of maybe a dozen robins, which surprised us because we’ve never before seen so many all together. So Spring is on it’s way. But not yet. The forecast for Thursday is predicting a wintry mix of rain, freezing rain, and snow showers. Michigan’s weather is so temperamental that people say we have at least 12 seasons instead of 4. They are: