This morning I was trimming the hedge around my front garden with the front door ajar. When I came back in, I saw a bird fluttering around in the kitchen. I quickly closed the kitchen door because I knew that, if it got out into the house with all the room doors open, I'd never catch it.

Fortunately it was obsessed with getting out through the glazed back door, so it was quite easy to catch in my hands. It turned out to be a robin. For the benefit of American readers, English robins are about half the size of yours and are famous for their fearlessness. They quite often come into houses. Where I used to work, we once had one that nested on the cistern of a ground-floor lavatory.

I was able to open the back door and throw it out. Any similar stories?

My cat, Miso, would make my interior a shambles if a bird got inside the house.

That said. I feed and water the local flying rodent population < pigeons, grackles , dove > with the outside dog vittles.

Every once in while. The dogs ambush em. The desert is harsher mistress than greener parts of the planet.

How is this Hazel. My other cat < Crash is now in RIP land > .

Cornered a Rattle Snake behind the clothes dryer so I would not get bit.

I have a few.

Not paying attention my cat was standing at the front door so I let her inside and soon discovered she had a bird in her mouth. Thinking it was dead I commanded her to drop it which she did but it wasn't dead an flew off into the house. It took awhile to capture it...

You would think I would learn from that experience but sometime later I let my cat in the house and discovered she caught a mouse. in the same manner it promptly ran off and slipped into a gap between the kitchen cabinets. A friend of mine as a small rodent trap and I easily caught it the next night.

I could claim it was night and I could not see but my cat caught a baby rabbit. A few years ago I had a couple of rabbit nests in my yard. Well it ran off and was hiding behind a piece of furniture. To make things easier I put my cat in a closed room. Well, I could not find the rabbit. I had left the door open and hoped it would find its way out so I thought that was the end of the story. It actually ran downstairs and hid back in my storage room. It wasn't till the next day when I could not find my cat that I discovered where it was hiding but unable to grab it. I was not able to get the trap for another day so I left some lettuce for it to eat. Eventually I caught and released it. It hopped away happily...

Cats like to bring their owners presents. We used to have a cat that was a great catcher of birds. We put a collar and bell on him, but it didn't seem to make any difference. He seldom killed the birds. He liked to bring them to my mother alive. She became quite adept at rescuing them. She would put them in a shoe box to calm down and then release them.

A later cat that we had was a great mouser. When we moved into the house where I still live, we had a lot of mice initially. I think there was a nest of them under the garden shed. Pippa brought us a mouse almost every day for a while, but fortunately she killed them first. After a couple of weeks, there were no more.