Yesterday evening our family cat, Pumpkin, dashed in the house with something in her mouth – turns out it was a bird…a bird that was still alive and chirping. (I have to wonder if she found the baby bird on the ground and decided to rescue it before the neighbor’s cat got it.)

Ever so gingerly Pumpkin was carrying this little bundle…but wouldn’t let us near it (she kept evading our attempts to ‘rescue’ it from her mouth).

We, of course, feared the worst—that Pumpkin, perhaps having ‘hunted’ and ‘caught’ her first bird would kill it and eat it—a horrifying thought, and not something I wanted to watch.

(It was certainly frustrating to have to listen to this chirping and not know to what degree the bird was injured, or how badly it was traumatized.)

It was only last week that Pumpkin had brought a still wriggling and dirt-caked worm into the living room to play with while the neighbor’s cat, Oz, watched from the porch and cried piteously.

Had Pumpkin now progressed to hunting birds?

Anyway, here was Pumpkin carrying this chirping bird around the rooms, with us scolding and following and pleading with her to give it up. But she proudly carried it around as if it was a trophy…or an errant kitten…and dashed back outside with it and jumped off the porch.

With much persuasion and circling on the grass, my fourteen-year-old daughter finally managed to grab Pumpkin and get her to release the little bundle. And while I donned garden gloves to gingerly pick up the bird, my daughter took Pumpkin into the house and closed her inside.

It was obvious the bird was in distress—it kept opening and closing its mouth as if gasping for breath (I had seen the children’s hamsters do that to a degree before their pets had died) so I wondered if this bird had been badly injured…or was it simply going through the motions for receiving food from its mother?

In any case, my hopes for a happy ending were dashed when the bird suddenly seemed to regain a burst of energy, keep it’s head upright, flap its wings, then unexpectedly jerk out of my hands and plummet to the ground.

It happened so fast, there was nothing I could do.

I hollered for help but it was too late.

The bird died right then…it stopped moving.

And it broke my heart.

I examined the bird for puncture wounds from the cat’s teeth—nothing!

What exactly had Pumpkin’s motives been?

Any thoughts?

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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