Here's Callie, also known as The Night Kitty. Despite the glare of her eyes in the flash Callie is a sweet cat who wants to be petted more than she wants to eat. She appears at sundown and runs away at dawn. She is terrified of the daylight world.
Callie showed up a year ago in March. She was about a year old then. She was so feral that I couldn't catch a glimpse of her at first. I would just hear her running away. My other outdoor cat eats on the front porch. They got to be friends and he let Callie eat his food. Gradually Callie let me get closer and closer and after about four months she let me stroke her while she was eating. She spent the cold winter nights in the heated doghouse on the front porch curled up with the other cat, Buddie. I worried that she would get pregnant before she was tame enough for me to handle, but she didn't. I worried too, that the coyotes would eat her, but so far they haven't.
I don't have to worry about pregnancy any more though. If you look closely at the picture you can see that the tip of Callie's right ear has been amputated. It's rounded off nicely and I didn't even notice it for a couple of weeks. I recently found out that it's what vets do when they spay feral cats. They "notch" the ear to let people know that cat has already been fixed.
Callie lets me pick her up for a few seconds now. She runs only about 10 feet away from my husband or son, but won't let them touch her. There are woods all around our house and Callie apparently spends her daylight hours in a section that encompasses several acres. I'm hoping she will eventually start staying at my house in the daytime.
Dawn comes and she tenses, looking all around, and flinching at every noise. In short order she is off and into the woods. Something bad happened to her in the daylight.
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