The Neighborhood Cats

Every neighborhood has its cast of regulars — and not all of them are people. Ours comes with a whole roster of cats, each one working its own territory on its own schedule with its own particular attitude. Lately I’ve been photographing them as I meet them on my walks, and they have personality to spare.

I caught this one in full stealth mode — crouched low, dead still, locked onto something I couldn’t see, those green eyes lit up like a pair of lanterns. That glow isn’t a trick of the camera: a cat’s eyes have a mirror-like layer behind the retina, the tapetum lucidum, that bounces light back through the eye a second time. It’s what gives them their remarkable night vision — and what makes them flash back at you out of the dark.

And this is Hazel. I caught her mid-yawn — though I prefer to think of it as her roar, a little house lion reminding the block exactly who’s in charge. Hazel passed away recently, and I’m grateful I have this one of her: mouth wide open, full of life, completely herself. Every neighborhood cat is somebody’s, and this one is dearly missed.

This handsome fellow is Buster — or so I’m told; names travel by word of mouth around here. He has the easy, unbothered look of a cat who knows every warm porch and shady bush on the block and considers all of them his. Every neighborhood has one: the confident regular who greets you like you’re the visitor on his territory.

And not every cat here has a name I know. This friendly one comes around every so often — never in a hurry, always good for a slow blink and a scratch behind the ears before carrying on with its rounds. The occasional visitors are their own kind of gift: you never know when they’ll turn up, so you learn to enjoy them while they’re here.

This sweetheart belonged to a friend of mine, and grew up in a house full of dogs — which explains everything about the greeting I got. No cool feline reserve, no waiting to be approached: this cat walked right up and asked to be pet, the way a dog trots over to meet a new arrival. Cats raised with dogs really do pick up some of the pack’s manners, and this one had clearly decided that strangers exist to provide ear scratches. I was happy to oblige.

This one I can’t name at all — just a close encounter and a stare I couldn’t look away from. Up close, a cat’s eyes are astonishing: those vertical slit pupils are the mark of an ambush hunter, able to clamp down to a hairline in bright sun and bloom wide open in the dark, giving them precise control most eyes can’t match. Whoever this cat belongs to, it looked straight through me, took my measure, and moved on. Cats.

And I’ll close with the most unexpected cat I’ve ever met — because I met this one on the water. I was kayaking the Willamette when a boat came by with a cat stationed at the bow, calm as any captain, directing operations. The owners told me the cat grew up aboard — this river is its neighborhood, the deck its territory. Ship’s cats are one of the oldest partnerships we have; cats have been sailing with people for thousands of years. This one just keeps the tradition alive on the Willamette, taking the bow like it was born to it. Because it was.

I’ll admit a small tension, though. I photograph these cats with real affection — but I photograph birds too, and now and then I catch one of these same cats crouched low in my garden, eyes fixed on the feeder. It’s worth saying plainly: free-roaming cats are one of the largest human-linked causes of songbird deaths — on the order of a billion or more birds a year in the U.S. alone. It isn’t the cats’ fault; it’s simply what they’re built to do.

But if you love a neighborhood cat, a few small kindnesses protect everyone. The gold standard is a catio — an enclosed porch that lets a cat drink in the outdoors without hunting in it. Short of that, a bell on the collar gives the birds a little warning, and a bright, colorful collar (the kind made just for this) works better still, since birds see color long before they ever hear a jingle. Keeping cats in at dawn and dusk helps too. Little things, and the songbirds get a fighting chance.

These portraits are lightly enhanced — the cats are exactly as I found them, with a little polish added to some of the backgrounds to let each one shine.