Sometimes the interaction between the wild and the domestic is something other than strained.

One year we had a visitor, a half-grown bobcat who might have been an orphan. I looked out the window and he was sitting under the bird feeders several feet from a jet-black Manx cat I had at the time named Nik. At first I thought this wasn't going to go well, but soon it became clear Nik was the mentor and they were hunting birds together. The bobcat came around several more times that summer, grew to pretty much full-size, and I never saw him again though I know he visited at least once during the following winter as there were bobcat tracks across the back garden in the snow hard on the heels of a set of rabbit tracks.

It was my first clear example of the way cats of many types teach young generations the nuances of mastering their instincts, much like the Hobbes teaching successive groups of kittens phenomenon I've showed you here. That bobcat was a handsome thing, too!

Talking of Hobbes just then, my wife's rather notorious relationship with the alarm clock once again resulted in it not going off this morning. No matter as Hobbes came in and rousted us out of bed. It's a job he takes very seriously. Now that I look back on it, no-one in his lifetime has ever been late for work because they overslept. Ever.