{"id":2392,"date":"2010-05-29T11:40:53","date_gmt":"2010-05-29T19:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/?p=2392"},"modified":"2010-05-29T11:40:53","modified_gmt":"2010-05-29T19:40:53","slug":"in-touch-with-the-inner-wildcat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/29\/in-touch-with-the-inner-wildcat\/","title":{"rendered":"In Touch with the Inner Wildcat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you one of the many cat owners who has a “chitterer”? My current cat just gazes in helpless abandon at birds outside, but most of the cats I’ve had made a clicking chittering call. There’s disagreement about what this means, from the side effect of an anticipatory jaw movement to a deliberate “bird call” to sheer frustration. <\/p>\n

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In margays, though, it’s an explicit imitation of prey<\/a>. It probably helps that tamarins have some calls that overlap with cat sounds. As Laelaps explains<\/a>, because vocalizations can be used to mark territory, “a monkey or other prey animal that thinks it is coming over to tell a competitor to buzz off may instead come face-to-face with a margay.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are you one of the many cat owners who has a “chitterer”? My current cat just gazes in helpless abandon at birds outside, but most of the cats I’ve had made a clicking chittering call. There’s disagreement about what this means, from the side effect of an anticipatory jaw movement to a deliberate “bird call” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[214,243,745,794,1187],"class_list":["post-2392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pictures","tag-cat","tag-chitter","tag-margay","tag-moneky","tag-tamarin"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4OKzG-CA","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}