Finally!! After months and months of thinking about doing this, I finally made a video for my cat to watch! It seems like a small enough thing – making a video of birds eating bird seed, but it was actually a really big thing to do. 

We got Navi, the Bombay cat last December a few months after Dini died. Navi is a 3 to 5 year old cat that ended up in the Humane Society because the people who had her before surrendered her. She was pregnant when they surrendered her (her babies died), and they had been living in a motel. It is this last bit of information that the daughter and I reference every day. 

Whenever Navi does something odd or peculiar – like drinking from the water dish from the back side only, picking food out of the dish and carrying it to another part of the room to eat, or meowing really loudly to announce her presence – we attribute it to motel living. 

“Oh, she does that because they didn’t have real food bowls in the motel.”

Navi loves, more than anything, to chase a crumpled up piece of paper. It would seem the people in the motel couldn’t afford better cat toys, or maybe they were too busy watching Maury and just couldn’t get around to playing with an actual toy. I imagine they used whatever paper they had handy – like old receipts they had from ordering pizza – to throw so the cat would not try to eat their food (because Navi will try to eat your food).

Navi likes to be entertained and it turns out she is happy to watch videos all day long. I stumbled across a “video that cats love to watch” because I searched for it. I don’t remember why I searched for it, It was the dead of winter and I wanted to do something nice for Navi and Zelda who had had a pretty horrible winter so far.

When Navi came to us she had an upper respiratory infection – basically a cat cold – and was pretty miserable. Zelda, was so upset by the new kitty that she took to bed (what we call under the armchair) for three months. It was horrible, I was sure we were going to have to rehome one of them and since Navi was a lot more fun (because she wasn’t hiding under the chair) it seemed like Zelda might be the better choice. Then Zelda got Navi’s cold just as Navi was feeling better. 

And just as I was ready to throw in the towel, convinced they would never be friends – because Zelda refused to leave the safety of the chair – something happened. Zelda came out of hiding and they started watching me work. Mostly, they started watching the cursor on my computer as I moved the mouse. 

So, I thought what else could they watch?

And, I ended up at videos cats love to watch on Youtube.

The cats were mesmerized by birds eating from a little pile of bird seed, not unlike the roadrunner when the coyote is trying to catch it. 

While there are numerous videos that cats love to watch about birds, squirrels, and other critters, they quickly bored me to tears. Not that that matters, the cats loved them. However, if the cats were going to watch Youtube videos, that meant I was too (because they have no idea how to do a proper search or navigate the mouse to press “play”. 

So, I decided, after about the 5th videos that cats love to watch, that I would make my own videos.

Also, possibly, because I am always on the lookout for a new distraction.

I dug out my GoPro and charged it up.

It had been years since I had used the GoPro (it’s Prime Day over on Amazon, so if you’ve ever wanted a GoPro now is a great time to buy one – yeah, that’s an affiliate link – you know you want one), we used it mostly when going to Wisconsin Dells or other water parks, but that had been years ago and there were updates to do and frankly I’d forgotten how the damn thing worked. I wasn’t even sure it would work or would be supported or would work on my current phone.

It did, to all of those thing, but I wouldn’t know this until many months later when I finally got around to setting it up and filming of video of birds eating from a little pile of bird seed. 

*Is bird seed one or two words? Birdseed seems to be a word. Dammit, now I have to go back and change all those videos on Youtube.

So, to make a really long story, just slightly longer, I made a video of birds, sparrows I think, eating birdseed so my cats can watch it when I’m bored. 

What kind of wonderful world do we live in that this is a thing? We’re busy bickering and arguing about Trump Baby Balloons and the Russians and Straws, when we should be watching videos that cat want to watch, or watch the cats watching the videos – because really, that’s the best part of the whole thing. 

I never really thought cats liked videos and for some reason I was under the impression they couldn’t see the TV – sort of like dogs – which now that I think about it something I must have just created in my head because Ruby spent a fair amount of time trying to get the people out of the TV by barking when she was a puppy.

But, I sort of digress. Actually this whole thing has been a digression.

If you have a cat, you need to introduce it to these wildlife videos. Of course if you use your computer all day like I do, you might regret it. Since I started showing the cats videos they will sit in front of my monitor making it nearly impossible for me to do any kind of work. 

Here’s my video of birds eating birdseed (and the momma bird feeds her baby birds!!!), since Youtube changed their rules I don’t make a thing from you watching it unless you park yourself on my channel and watch something like 5000 hours of videos. You can’t because I don’t have more than an hour or two total and while they are mostly of the cats or dogs, they aren’t that interesting unless you’re just really that bored and then by all means – rock on!