Yup, it’s a cat sitting in an abandoned bird (or squirrels, not sure) nest. Made me laugh. :)
Sorry it’s an overly poor quality pic - it was almost dark outside and I had to push the ISO to 1600 and brighten the image in a photo editor.

One of the houses next door to us is a rental, and the people living there has changed once already, since we bought our house. The new folk are quiet and thus tolerable (heh), and they are cat people, which makes them automatically cool. The only problem is they have at least 3 cats, and they’re all outdoor ones, which means I find a lot more cat-poop in the dirt/tanbark areas of our yard. Drives me crazy, and is one argument for indoor-only cats. At least (most) pet dogs can’t jump six foot fences to poo in prodigious quantities in neighbors yards….

Also, the cats (naturally) like to annoy the squirrels/birds, so I tend to shoo the cats out of our yard when I happen to see them. Not that these cats are much danger to the squirrels - they’re small cats, maybe 6-8 pounds, and we’ve seen the squirrels actually jump at the cats in a threatening manner and make the cats back off. But since I prefer the squirrels to neighbor kitties, I’d rather the kitties learn that our yard can’t be their playground -at least during the day.

I call this black squirrel “Stubby.” In case it’s not obvious, he only has half a tail. Or maybe 5/8’s of a tail. It makes him very recognizable even from a distance. Perhaps he caught it in a mousetrap or something. He is very nervous and kind of “crawls” towards me until I toss him something.

Side note: Maybe I should make a blog sub-category of ‘backyard squirrels” or something. Then again, once I’m done posting the initial rash of squirrel pics and stories, I probably won’t post too many more after that. Meh. I don’t know.

Occasionally, a squirrel or two is sitting on the lawn in sight of the glass door and happy to see me. Most aren’t that comfortable with me (which is a good thing) and will, instead, hover back on the fences or whatever, waiting to see if I’m going to put stuff in dishes. As I said, there’s a few who are quite bold/brave, but more on them later.

It’s hard to take an in-focus picture of a running squirrel….

I don’t typically name backyard wild animals, because they’re not like cats or dogs where you become all cozy and cuddly with them - not to mention, it’s often hard to tell them apart - but some of the critters I do eventually tend to associate with a casual moniker. For instance, I think of this black squirrel as “ScarHead” or “ScarTop”, for obvious reasons.

I have no idea if he sustained his injury while fighting with other squirrels, or because he had some parasites or something, but it looked ugly. Initially it was even worse than in the top picture. I’ve read that squirrels can get fly larva parasites under their skin, which create big bumps. When the larva matures it burrows out, leaving an open sore spot. They don’t really hurt the squirrels, but I’m sure it’s irritating. Anyway, perhaps something like that happened to this fellow.

After a couple months, the injury was largely healed, and at this point I can barely tell it was there. By now, however, I can recognize him by other means - personality, certain color tones/spots on his head, etc.

It’s been raining. And raining. Which is good, since we’re in the middle of a bad drought. The backyard squirrels still come to the sliding glass door between heavy downpours. I could talk all day about the squirrels in our yard … one day I’ll blog about it in depth. Maybe.

But in brief, after a couple months of patience, many will now quickly come when I call or when they hear the door slide open. There’s maybe 7 or 9 of them that visit either every day or every other day. I spoil them I suppose, and a few will take food from my hand now, but I’m also careful about making sure they stay wild. In other words, they do just fine if I skip giving them anything etc. :P

The squirrels eat a little of what I hand out - I’m very particular about what I give them, with a large variety of nuts and some fruit - but mostly they love to bury everything. Their favorite nuts to bury appears to be almonds (shelled or unshelled), unshelled walnuts, and unshelled peanuts, in that order. Some will watch and dig up what one squirrel buried, only to rebury it. Their “I must bury” obsession never seems to end. They’re very busy creatures that give me hours of amusement from just watching them through the windows.

I still put out birdseed, too. There’s at least 8 mourning doves and quite a few bluebirds that caw-caw-caw for their daily peanuts. Gazillions of pictures have been snapped…I think I’ll start posting some of them, now. May as well…what’s the point of taking a photo if you never share it?

My cat Baby in one of those “cat” sleeping poses. Lying on side, one back leg askew, one front paw curled over face. He always looks so cute…but so far I’ve never been able to truly capture the “cuteness”. Still, the bottom photo is good for checking out a cat’s nostrils, if you’re so inclined.