Its simple. You buy the cheapest .22 caliber semi auto rifle thats worth a damn, a Savage Model 64. Then you buy a box or two of CCI Stinger hyper-velocity 22 LR rounds. Take them home and practice and set your iron sights to be dead on at 15 yards or less… you wll need to adjust the rear sight all the way down (have the dovetail sititng on the last ”step” of the elevation blade towards you.. this will set your rounds for very close range shots. If your shot pattern is too far left then move the front sight to the right. adjust both until you are placing rounds in a half dollar size circle consistently at 20 yards. Watch for him at night until you identify the path he takes through your property. He will always follow the same pattern… once you found it set up in a line of fire away from anything that your common sense tells you wont hit someone or something if you miss… but you wont. Not at that range and not with the practice youve had. I suggest attaching a small ”tactical light” or securing a small bright flashlight with easy on/off button not a twist on/off type to the lower left hand side of the barrel.. at about your 7 o clock. far enough forward on the barrel as to not block out front sight visibility in the barrell shadow. remain quiet and still until you see him. He will normally keep to the same schedule so if you can figure that out then get to your ambush spot a half hour earlier. When he appears slowly slowly raise rifle and set your shot up. control your breathing. pop your light on, make a small tisk tisk sound and he will freeze and look right into the light and wont move until he can figure out what that blinding light is. He wont see you behind the light. Aim for the neck. if your shot goes a little high its a headshot, a little low… the vitals, lungs, heart. If your dead on and hit him in the neck… same result as either one of the other shots… dead. a hyper velocity round with a hollowpoint lead nose will hit him like a freight train at that range. It will mushroom upon entry and dump its kinetic energy into him. Thats the importance of hollowpoint rounds. a regular 22 LR round will also kill in any of the three hit zones before mentioned… the problem is a 22 round is a penetrator by nature… like a laser it will punch all the way straight through and come out the other side still retaining its shape, mass, and a lot of its energy if you dont hit in the exact right spot ie heart, lungs, neck, brain. anywhere else and hes taking off like you never hit him and unless you hit an artery hes not gonna bleed out from the tiny entry and exit wound. He may die eventually.. maybe… in a bad way. You dont deserve to take the shot if you arent confident you can make the kill quick and clean. If he bolts after you shoot dont freak out… only shot you are gonna get that will drop him instantly is a brain shot. the neck and vitals are guaranteed death within 30 seconds.

Unless the parent tree was own root the sucker yours came from is the sweet cherry rootstock and not the named cultivar that was presumably grafted onto it. Either the rootstock seedling happens to be a yellow cherry as well or the whole parent tree, including the roots was the yellow cultivar. Sweet cherry is actually a weed species in this region and suckers to form groves on local wooded hillsides, where it even overtakes and overtops the native red alder trees often present in quantity on the same sites. It also crosses with the much less exuberant, native bitter cherry to produce a nearly fruitless, intermediate hybrid called Puget cherry. Some ~tall examples of the latter are conspicuous when in bloom, on undeveloped land between I-5 and Lakeside School (near Seattle). It is usual to have problems with suckering and bony surface roots with plantings of sweet cherries - perhaps all the more so when these are present as rootstocks for Japanese flowering cherries. All you can do is uncover the bases of the suckers and saw them away. If there are horizontal runners that lead back to the original planting follow these back to the parent tree and saw them off at their points of origin, pull the rest up. You don't, of course want to saw off normal roots of the parent tree - just the ones that are suckering runners like aspen trees and running species of bamboos produce. This post was edited by bboy on Sat, Mar 15, 14 at 17:05

As I wrote in my post, my reference was to domestic cats, not to feral or barn cats who live their lives without being fed or receiving immunizations, deworming, external parasite prevention, and other routine veterinary care. I have precise first hand knowledge of what species my cats have killed over the past 40+ years and a good idea of how many of each because they bring their quarry home to my front porch and, being well fed, only occasionally do they eat one of their game animals. I could probably count on my fingers the number of birds my cats have killed over the past decades, and among these were a few English sparrows. I would say that on average 6 to 11 baby barn swallows have fledged from nests on our front porch and eaves of the barn each year, despite the presence of our cat(s.) The parent bird who fell victim this year is the only swallow killed by one of our cats ever, so I'd say that the survival rate is highly stacked in favor of the swallows. (Seven on average x 40 some years is a large sum of swallows that have come into being on my felines' terrain.) Toxoplasma gondii only poses a threat to developing fetuses and those with severely compromised immune systems. It is important that pregnant women avoid contact with litter boxes. Other than this caution, the risks posted on the inflammatory website you posted are highly exaggerated. As I also stated, this is a moot point since my current kitty has only perhaps another year of going outdoors and I do not intend to replace her when she is gone. We will have to agree to disagree on this point.

Thanks everyone. The puzzle pieces are falling in place. I think that the circling hawks I saw may well have been parents teaching their youngsters to hunt, judging from the calling to one another and the fact that two of these hawks appeared to be a slightly different color and a bit smaller than the other two. I'm feeling greatly relieved to think that the swallows and hummers are safe somewhere else. The hawks don't lack for food this year. Some of the rabbits are really huge and a single one would feed a family of hawks. Last year a neighbor's dog killed the fox babies in the den at the edge of the woods behind our meadow. :-( Needless to say the parent foxes went elsewhere to raise young this year, and this left a plentitude of rodents and a predator niche that the hawks are now filling. Also our cat has grown too old to hunt as she once did and the two neighbor cats are rather clueless when it comes to prey. So the hawks are seemingly reaping the rewards. We have had a multitude of robins this year as well, and they have raised several batches of fledglings. I'm surprised that they too have not flown off in fear of the winged predators, and also surprised that the overpopulation of moles have left them worms to eat. But I'll just enjoy watching the hawks and robins, since they are the most ubiquitous right now.