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Nature

Furry great tits

The cats are shedding at the moment — at times recently Dolly has seemed like a walking cloud of hair with a cat faintly discernible somewhere in the middle.

So I got a Furminator to help collect some of the excess, and that means great big clumps of cat hair to dispose of, so I put it out for the birds to use as nesting material. And it has been gratifyingly popular.

Incidentally, it is amazing how much you can rescue a picture taken in RAW format. I didn’t have the right camera settings when I took these pictures and they were all overexposed; especially that last one. This is what it looked like when I downloaded it from the camera:

And basically all I did was turn down the ‘Exposure’ setting in iPhoto, and a little bit of fiddling with the sharpness and the white balance. The adjusted version is hardly perfect, but when I saw it I assumed it would be completely unusable, so I’m pretty happy with the result.

2 replies on “Furry great tits”

How culd one resist a heading like that popping up in one’s feeds?!

I am impressed with your chicken wire fur dispenser; I’ve often put the dog’s hair out on top of the hedges, but it quickly becomes a soggy mass, and there don’t seem to be many takers for it – or perhaps they just prefer cat hair, though the dog’s is quite soft. I like to think of your birds having beautifully soft cat fur linings to their nests, and it’s also a kind of turning the tables on their would-be predators.

The chicken wire works beautifully for cat hair, but I can’t claim much credit for my design skills, since I originally made it to hold fat balls. Which was not a success.

I hang the hair up right next to a couple of bird feeders, so that might be one reason why they found it quickly, I don’t know. But I’ve put out two or three batches, and it all goes within a few hours, so they obviously like it.

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