Birthday Boy

Today Bali celebrates making it through his first twelve months. Here's a collection of his best pics across this debut year.

Guatemalan homes tend to have roughly equal quantities of indoors and outdoors, and Bali is our most indoor cat, and also the most polite and gentle. Feeding him a piece of ham is like putting your credit card into an ATM.

He'll wait for as long as necessary outside any door he knows we're behind, but once inside will jealously maintain his personal space. His response to over-petting has earned him the apodo 'The Ginger Whinger'.

— Favourite toys: Straws, dental floss, TV remotes, iPod cables and headphones, brooms in motion.

— Favourite TV: David Attenborough, Disney-Pixar animations...basically anything where some of the participants have tails.

— Favourite foods: Papaya, tomato, mandarins, grapes, frijoles and the usual meats and treats. (Doesn't like tortilla, pasta, rice, bananas or fried plantains.)

— Favourite sleeping places: My foot and the doghouse.

Screensnaps #8

This little amphibian — a pebble toad - looks like something that might be jettisoned skywards out of Fuego's fervid crater!

Not all our cats enjoy watching TV, we have discovered. Bali does though; and so does his mother Wizzy, but we've never seen any real evidence that she is really seeing what we see.

But with Bali it's different. His eyes followed this toad's tumble down the side of a mountain and when he spotted the cause of this emergency maneuver — an enormous toad-eating tarantula — he turned to look at me to make a slightly distressed burble and then quickly re-focused on the progress of this eight-legged beasty.

We plan to watch the next episode of David Attenbrough's Life (mammals) with Bali in order to discover what else fascinates him.

His usual position is at the end of the bed right in front of the big screen. During the episode about reptiles a wave hit the camera and Bali looked down below the bed, as if expecting the floor to have been flooded by this sudden deluge!

Moscas

Fortunately our cats, Bali in particular, have learned to be more expert fly-catchers!

This is somehow familiar...

Cat facts...and mysteries (3)

19.7% of Guatemalans profess to dislike them - nearly twice the number that claim to hate snakes.

Cat facts...and mysteries (2)

When first presented with a new morsel of food cats - well, my cats at least - rapidly touch it against their noses before tucking in...rather like Robert in Everybody Loves Raymond.

Cat facts...and mysteries (1)

The terminal velocity of your average feline is 60mph, which means that their instinctive righting mechanism - which permits them to land patas abajo - is usually only operative in falls of roughly six storeys and under. Anything above that and the cat's nervous system is spiked and it is unable to swing midair into a comparatively safe landing position.