E -- Eyes

E is for Eyes.

Cats can see in the dark better than humans. Well, we can if there's a little bit of light. If it's totallly dark, like in the old camera man's darkroom, we can't see at all either.

There are two kinds of eye cells -- rods and cones. Cones distinguish colors better, and rods work better in low light. Humans have more cones and we have more rods. So when it gets dark, we get better. Sometimes in the daylight it gets so bright we just have to close our pupils down almost all the way.

We also have linings so the light goes through our eyes twice. Humans sometimes see it when our eyes reflect the light that is there and our eyes shine back at them.

We see better in the dark, but we also like to be active around sunset and sunrise, when we can get both the day and night prey. This is called crepescular, from crépescule, a french word for sunset. If we only hunt at night, we won't get any of the daytime birds and mice, and sometimes the mama birds will be protecting their babies rather than hunting or gathering food for them. Sometimes we can track things that are moving (like that drawstring on a human's sweatshirt) better than we can see things that aren't moving anymore (like the treats they just dropped in front of us). Other times we hunt by sound, but that's a topic for another letter and maybe another year.

And our eyes come in diffferent colors, too. OUrs are a sort of golden brown, but some are green or blue. Rico had trouble opening her second eye when she was a kitten.