I like Christmas, I like giving presents, picking out a live tree and putting a fresh wreath on the door.

The snow is a plus and the festivities with friends and family are joyful respites from the day to day regular routines.

I also like that the birds come in numbers to my feeders. The Audubon Winter Bird Count is going full steam and if you have any kind of feed station set up and binoculars, you should have quite a show of the winter flocks of birds.

I have found that setting the feeding station away from the house is best due to the problems with bird collisions and windows. I also have issues with predators such as cats and hawks who also have claimed the feeding station as their own.

I chose to put my stands near trees with plenty of branches, but also open enough to keep hiding places for predators to a minimum.

This year we had a feral cat choose to adopt our property as her own and she had significant prowess as a mouser and chipmunk exterminator. When she brought home her litter of kittens to our garage, I knew that I had trouble.

Fortunately we were able to eventually tame the kittens and later caught the mother cat in a box trap and had all of them have a visit with Operation Spay and Neuter. I don’t have a mouse or chipmunk problem any longer but I never knew how brave a 10 pound cat could be with all opponents.

It all started with a phone call from my wife as I was out and about one afternoon.

She was calling to tell me about the young cat we named Finn due to his preference to hang out in my fishing boat. He loves to bounce around on the canvas tarp and he generally is up for an adventure.

She was watching him from the window as he stalked my neighbor Mike’s deer target decoy and pounced on it like a cougar to her amazement. Although I didn’t see it, I did believe that he was capable of such a feat.

A week or so later, we had a group of deer come into the yard to explore our shrubs and landscape plants.

Unfortunately they had done a significant trimming job on my blueberry bushes and to the vinca vines and were becoming even bolder as they walked down the sidewalk in the early afternoon.

Finn is very curious and he had never met up with a deer before. He decided that they warranted investigation and he started to stalk the group of does. He circled them and came up from behind them much like his relative the cougar might do.

The deer ignored him until he came up and touched his muzzle with the biggest doe. She stomped her foot, but he went past her to a little button buck, the buck panicked and deer were flying everywhere with the six month old cat on their trail.

Ever since then he has been pretty full of himself and he has claimed the alpha hunter spot in the family this week.

Unfortunately, Finn won’t be able to help us out in flintlock season that opens up after Christmas. The season opens up on Dec. 27 and runs until Jan. 15 statewide and either bucks or does are legal with your appropriate license and muzzleloader stamps.

I expect some good hunting opportunities in the upcoming weeks as the deer and small game will be getting back into a regular routine now that the hunting pressure has diminished.

The late season hunt is a great time to be in the woods as most of the time you will never have issues with being crowded out of your favorite hunting spots.

Don’t forget that fishing licenses are on sale and that the steelhead fishing in the tributaries of Lake Erie will be in full swing. You will need the regular license and the combo stamp to be a legal angler.

I think that the fishing license pre-paid voucher is a great gift for the outdoorsman that is hard to please and seems to have everything.

Until we meet again, keep you powder dry and the ice out of your fishing rod guides!

Jay Hewitt is an outdoor columnist for the Butler Eagle