People who know me professionally tend to imagine that I’m a data scientist of some sort, or perhaps an IT person.

And that’s sort of true, I did work on digital archiving solutions for AIATSIS and ANU, I did also work as a volunteer for the National Trust documenting the contents of both Dow’s Pharmacy and Lake View House for input into their digital asset management system, and I’m now documenting the historic book collection for Stanley Athenaeum.

But it’s also true that I only started working in IT to pay the rent.

My academic specialisation was in animal behaviour, and I later worked as field ecologist in Mid-Wales.

It was over forty years ago and things may have changed, but then commercial agriculture hadn’t really happened there, it was all small farms and small fields with overgrown hedges that provided wildlife refuges, fields that hadn’t been ploughed using heavy machinery, and old medieval churches that had more or less fallen out of use except for the occasional wedding or funeral and provided excellent bat roosts.

I’m perhaps exaggerating a little, but this was great fun, even if a lot of it seemed to involve getting soaked while counting things on transects, it also allowed me to use my quite amateur historian skills to work with old maps to see which hedges were possibly result of the various enclosure acts, and which, using Hooper’s rule, might be older, possibly Tudor or medieval in origin.

It also gave me my first introduction to what we now call data science, writing programs to display and make sense of the data.

However, there really wasn’t a place for this in Margaret Thatcher’s brave new Britain, so I ended up working in IT in a university always with a game plan to get back into history and ecology in some way.

Didn’t happen. Only when I retired did I get back into history through my work with the National Trust, and I’ve never really managed to get back into ecology.

However, having two cats in the house showed me a number of quite interesting things about cat behaviour.

Lucy, who died a few days ago, had been our other cat’s foster mother.

By pure chance, we had the opportunity to adopt Lucy when she was being retired as a breeding queen and Oscar, our other cat, was not quite six months old.

Lucy had also previously fostered Oscar when his real mum became sick after giving birth to Oscar and his siblings.

Despite what some people had said, they recognised each other almost immediately and Lucy took on a mentoring role to Oscar, calling him and trying to teach him to hunt whenever a bird was incautious enough to hop through the wire of their enclosure. (They hardly ever caught anything, and most of the birds that hang about our garden seemed to learn pretty quickly to avoid the catio.)

As Oscar grew up and matured, their relationship changed and they became more close friends and companions than mother and kitten, and sometimes Oscar would call Lucy to help him try (and usually fail) to kill something.

When Lucy got sick, he would groom her and cuddle up to her at night, and a few days before she died, he caught a native finch, which for the first time ever he presented to me, as the dispenser of cat kibble, as if to help feed Lucy.

Possibly being a tad anthropomorphic here, but he did start showing a lot more caring behaviour towards her as she became sicker, and is clearly quite upset that she’s no longer around.

While I was researching what to do about feline grief and how to help your cat move on (yes, this is a thing), I was struck by how little information there really was about domestic cat behaviour.

I’m guessing that this is because (a) a lot of cats are the only cat in the household, and (b) in the days when cats were allowed to roam, a lot of the social behaviour and cat mentoring went on at the bottom of the garden behind the compost bins.

Now, if we know so little about domestic cat behaviour, how much do we really know about feral cat behaviour?

I suspect less than we think. Having Oscar and Lucy together showed me something about how relationships might change over time within a clan of feral or semi feral cats, but really I don’t know, and I’m not convinced that anyone has studied groups of cats using modernt tracking technology and analytical techniques …