Critter Quirks

Years ago, I put a stone in the birdbath as a ramp for the convenience of the bees. Yet since then, I have only seen one bee stand on the stone and drink. The others all prefer to hang from the edge of the birdbath by their back legs, and drink upside down. Sometimes they fall in, and I have to rescue them.

My tiny dog Truffle is full of quirks. To pee, he always lifts his right leg, never his left. But when he’s on his pee pad, which has a little plastic fence around it, he spins clockwise. This puts him in a quandary because his right leg is on the inside, and to lift it against the fence he has to change direction. I can see the dilemma in his little face as he spins faster and faster, feeling the urgency grow, but unable to reverse direction and get relief.

When Truffle and I are sitting side by side on the sofa, the minute I stand up he rushes over to occupy my seat. This might make sense in the depths of winter, but Truffle also does it in the dog days of summer. It is odd, since he has as much wool on his body as a prize winning Merino sheep, and ordinarily shows a decided preference for cool as opposed to hot temperatures. Why then is he so determined to capture every last degree of the body heat I leave behind?

I haven’t been able to figure out his attitude to stairs, either. At first I believed that, since he had never been exposed to them, I would have to teach him what they were for. But my first attempts seemed to terrify him, and there were so many other issues that needed attention that I decided to let it go temporarily. Then one day, as we came to a flight of nine steps near the house, he flew up them, unprompted. “Brave dog!” I exulted as he reached the top, “Now you can do stairs!” But the next time we came to those same stairs, he balked. No matter how much I encouraged, pleaded, and enticed him with treats, he refused to move. Months passed, and whenever we approached those steps, I would pick him up and carry him, thinking bitter thoughts. Then the other day, for no reason I could see, he flew up those stairs again. He’s done it a couple more times since, but I’m not counting on it.

The cat Telemann is relatively quirkless, except for his addiction to eating spider plants. But recently I’ve been waking up in the morning with odd little scratch marks, maybe a quarter of an inch long, on my cheeks and forehead. Then the other night, in the darkest hour before the dawn, I awoke to find Telemann snuggled up against me on the pillow, one paw flung across my neck, and the other resting on my jaw. He was purring into my ear, and clenching and unclenching his fingers, nails extended, on my skin. He wasn’t digging hard enough to keep me awake, so I let him stay. Sure enough, the next day there were two small scratch marks on my jaw.

I will put up with a lot from my feline incubus, but one thing that I cannot abide, because it wakes me up so completely that I don’t have a prayer of going back to sleep, is the touch of a stiff whisker across my nose.

Why do bees drink upside down? Why does Truffle spin clockwise? Why does the cat become amorous in the middle of the night? I will never know—just as their vigilant minds will never figure out what prompts me to spend hours tapping with my fingers and making little black marks jump around on the screen, or why I neutralize my personal aromas with soap and water. Or, quirkiest of all in Truffle’s view, why I lunge to collect his every poop the minute it hits the ground, and spirit it away to some undisclosed location.