My cats are watching bats!

[Kathy in Cambridge]

They are flitting about eating mosquitoes. The cats are mesmerized...one of them keeps doing that weird thing with his mouth. I think he knows they're mice with wings!

[Liberal Veteran]

1. Don't let Evita find out.....

:)

[Kathy in Cambridge]

2. Ohhh-that's right!

Evita may be on the next Amtrak train up to Boston! We've got plenty of bats for her enjoyment!

[benburch]

3. Lynnesin's cat killed one recently...

that had somehow gotten in her house!

[Sporadicus]

4. That Weird Thing With Their Mouths

I don't know if there's a proper term for it, but I've seen cats do that while watching birds. Sometimes they meow in a soft, staccato voice. I call them sheep-cats when they're doing it.

[Liberal Veteran]

5. It's a smelling thing....

Cats (along with snakes and a few other mammals) have a magnificent organ called the vomeronasal organ, most oftenly known as the Jacobson's Organ. It is located inside the mouth, just behind the front teeth, and connects to the nasal cavity. Opening his mouth slightly enables the Jacobson's Organ to open up the ducts connecting to the nasal cavity. The appearance of the cat as he brings air into the Jacobson's Organ has sometimes been likened to a "smile," other times to a grimace.

[Don_G]

7. Uh-Oh

Talking about organs on a feline thread.

MODS!!!!!!

[Don_G]

6. My Cat Hunts In Her Sleep

"To sleep, perchance to dream...." of nailing a mouse maybe?

[Beware the Beast Man]

9. My cat does that when he's birdwatching too

It sounds sometimes as if he's gagging. He also makes that "Brrrrtt" sound too.

[DemoTex]

8. I just cooked out with the bats buzzin' my head.

We have big bat caves 100 meters behind the house. That's where the panther lives, too (we think).

[AlGore-08.com]

10. Cats with a bat story...

One night around 3am I was woken up by a sound I couldn't identify. I walked out into the hall and saw my two cats sitting on opposite sides of the hall, staring up at something. Before I could look up to see what had the cats so fascinated, I was buzzed by a bat. Somehow it had gotten into the apartment and couldn't find it's way out. So it was flying back and forth down the hall and my cats were watching it like it was a tennis match.

The only thing I could think of doing to catch it was to shoot it with a water pistol. So I stood in the hall with the cats, shooting the bat each time it passed.

It took a while, but eventually the bat was too wet to fly and fell to the floor. The cats and I raced to the bat. Fortunately they were so used to ceding dominance to me that they didn't kill it. They watched me scoop it up with a newspaper and return it to the wild.

I was totally grossed out, but the cats had a great time.