That's really quite nice. They're basically a part of the community. Haha

I'm curious though, how does your neighborhood avoid being overrun? I've been asking myself that too lately and the best I can come up with is that they're territorial. So somebody someplace has to be having kittens, but if they're not part of the local clique, they get chased away. (btw, I've read that female ferals can get pregnant before they're even a year old)

I never put out water because a) I'm lazy and it's an extra trip and b) there's a free flowing stream that's about 20 meters (65 feet) past the end of the property.

Lately what I've been doing is adding water to the food bowl. That serves a couple of purposes. It gives them some water with their food and since the kibble seems to absorb the water, it plumps up the food bowl.

That second part is useful because the guys that consume most of my "cat" food are in fact, not the cats but the raccoons. And they have become quite rotund at my expense. [shrug - live and let live]
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Today was interesting because I stopped at Wawa (a chain of convenience stores) for gas but decided to also get lunch.

I'm a vegetarian trying to go vegan so I thought I was ordering a swiss cheese sub/hoagie. There was one slice of swiss and about 10 slices each of ham and salami.

I don't like to take things back and it didn't really bother me anyway but what to do with the meat. Hmmm, the cats maybe?

Oh my lord, you'd think it was crack or crank for cats. It was completely gone in under 15 minutes.

Oh my - you have people actually designated to, at least in some sense, to care for the ferals. That's really very nice.

He or she is correct about the birds. This is going to be difficult to explain without photos, but I'll do my best.

My back porch was added to the house at a point later than the original living quarters. The addition consisted of a garage that partially below ground and on the same level as the basement. If that doesn't make any sense, the reason is that the plot of land the house is built upon is a gently sloping hillside with an elevation of maybe 5 feet (slightly more than 1.5 meters).

Since the builder was the original owner and a contractor (builder) in his own right, I think he made some mistakes along the way. For example, the garage section is slightly higher than the basement by about an inch or so. I think that converts to roughly 25mm.

Well in addition to that, the new section, on both the back and front face, is "indented" from the main house by about 1-1.5 feet.(x - 0.46m). The back porch was then inserted into this indentation.

For reasons I don't really understand, the indented sections were both built with over hanging eaves. Oh, wait - it was built that way so there could be attic vents in the overhangs.

Anyway, as a result, the eaves give very partial protection to the back porch. So what I did, initially, was to put the food bowl in the protected corner of the porch. Over than, I placed the top of an old redwood bench over the bowl such that it gave the bowl about a 1.5ft or 0.46m clearance above the bowl.

The bowl is cemented to a 50lb block since the racoons continuously tried to run away with the bowl.

OK, I have to break here since I really need to provid some photos. The thing is though that wild animals like raccoons aren't exactly clean so the back porch is quite filthy. Even so, I must overcome my misplaced vanity.

By the way. it's possible that weeks might go by between my posts. That mostly means there's not much to report. But I also have very limited energy most days.