Documenting and interfering with a mouse hunt.

Atom likes a high vantage point.

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Last night, he heard some rustling sounds in a large bush below.

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And so he jumped down to investigate, circling the bush several times.

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He stuck his head in, sometimes completely diving in and disappearing from view.

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He eventually caught the mouse which he offered to me. The mouse was in shock, I managed to snap a shot of it (with the flashlight app from my mobile while 'zone focusing' at f/1.1 on the Leica with my other hand) before Atom tried to grab it back because I totally wasn't playing with it.

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But I grabbed Atom before he could reclaim the mouse, I carried him and threw him (not literally) back in the house in via the front door. I had to do it twice because after I shut the front door, Atom would run through the house and out the back door, jump a couple of fences and a roof to get back to where we were. I raced around and grabbed him again before he caught up to the mouse. In the mean time the mouse escaped up a neighbour's fence.

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By the time Atom came back the third time, the mouse had run further along the fence quite a ways over into another neighbour's fence. Atom didn't know that, so he went back to the old spot and kept his eyes peeled looking for it.

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I helped the mouse by using a twig to usher it further along the fence as far away as possible. Here's Atom still waiting at the old spot while I was with the mouse further along.

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After a while Atom jumped on the fence himself to have a look.

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Further along the fence, the mouse eventually recovered from the shock and managed to jump on to an adjoining wall and leapt into some bushes and disappeared.

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Atom was a persistent bastard, he kept up the hunt but he was looking in all the wrong places.

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Next, I will travel to Africa to document a pack of hyenas while they hunt for food. At least their food will probably already be dead.
 
James,

Wonderful series. You shot that with -- what? -- a Leica with the Hubble attached?

For a couple of years now I have threatened that if I ever owned a Leica with Noctilux, I would do a photojournalistic series on a black cat eating licorice in a coal bin at midnight during a total eclipse. Your series is as close as anyone has come.

Well done!

Cheers, Jock
PS -- Your series is even more fun if you view the pix with a "Wild Kingdom" audio track playing in your head: "Today, we go tracking the wild tabby as he hunts the dangerous field mouse . . ."
 
Thank you all!

Jadey my other cat was actually beside me or not far from me through all this. She wasn't interested in catching mice at all.

The whole mouse hunt happened over a period of more than two hours, 3am to well after 5am when the crack of dawn cracked at dawn. I slept about half an hour before I had to wake up to get some other things done.
 
James,

Wonderful series. You shot that with -- what? -- a Leica with the Hubble attached?

For a couple of years now I have threatened that if I ever owned a Leica with Noctilux, I would do a photojournalistic series on a black cat eating licorice in a coal bin at midnight during a total eclipse. Your series is as close as anyone has come.

Well done!

Cheers, Jock
PS -- Your series is even more fun if you view the pix with a "Wild Kingdom" audio track playing in your head: "Today, we go tracking the wild tabby as he hunts the dangerous field mouse . . ."

I don't know Wild Kingdom, but I do know David Attenborough's programs, or Steve Irwin!

Boy oh boy, I wish I had a Noctilux or the SLR Magic Hyperprime 50mm f/0.95. That would be magic. I'd be able to cover more of the walks I take in the middle of the night with Keesha, Jadey, and Atom.
 
Fun story! Atom's like, "WTF! I give you a toy and you lose it right away!"

Yeah he was frustrated because I was chasing him for a while before he finally dropped the mouse and let me have it. Then after a few minutes of fiddling with my mobile and the camera and trying to get the shot of the mouse without touching it, he started questioning whether I really wanted it in the first place. That's when he grabbed it back and the chase continued until he dropped it again.
 
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