My newest owner…Angel by name, displays a behavior I have never seen in any of the many other cats I have owned. He will be in hunting mode, eyeballing a fly or something else that catches his eye. He will sit there in the pounce posture, you know, where their rear feet move up and down, but he opens his mouth wide and clicks his lower jaw??? It actually makes a clicking sound.
I have never seen this, has anyone else? Does anyone know what it means?
Oh yes-I see this in several of my cats when they’re watching birds. I don’t know WHY they do it, but rest assured, it’s normal feline behavior.
Yeah, one our cats does it too, but also makes little chirping noises.
I’ve seen (actually heard) that from several cats. One explanation I’ve seen is the following:
The cat doing this is an inexperienced hunter. It is anticipating what it will do to the prey when catching it. An experienced hunter, or one that is well taught by an experienced hunter mamma cat, will not do this, since it alerts the prey.
And both my cats are dumb and never hunt, and they both make this noise. Perfectly normal. We call it, “singing to the nice birdies”, with heavy irony.
My cats have done this when they see a prey animal they can’t attack (through a window). http://cats.about.com/cs/catmanagement101/a/how_cat_work.htm “Ever see a cat zeroing in on a bird he sees through the window? Suddenly there’s a great deal of clicking of teeth, sometimes combined with an ack-ack gutteral noise that you’ve never before heard your cat make. This behavior is called “chattering” and it even has the experts stumped. Perhaps it’s nothing but frustration, as the cat obviously would like to make a meal of the bird. Sometimes they actually salivate while carrying on, so this explanation could be a good guess.”
http://www.catsplay.com/thedailycat/2003-07-28/behavior_qa/2003-07-28.html "Just about every cat makes this chattering sound when he’s looking at potential prey through the window. A cat makes this sound when he’s very excited by the sight of prey but knows he doesn’t have access to it. This is his way of relieving his frustration.
His instincts as a predator also lead him to crouch down while watching the prey so he can remain invisible, but he knows there’s no need to do the treading with his hind feet (the butt wiggle) because he won’t be pouncing on anything. "
A sometimes posited explanation is the teeth clicking is a frustrated “killing bite”.
While the posters who say he’s singing to the birdies seem to be correct, they should withhold the laughter at the cat’s expense. One of our two cats does the same thing, and while I thought it was cute, I also laughed at his poor ability to sing like a bird. One day, I heard him doing his thing, then realized that he wasn’t in the house, as my wife had taken him to the vet. There’s a bird that does make this sound, but we have way too many birds around so I haven’t been able to identify which one it is yet.
If it would help any ornithologists (I’m not one) to narrow it down, I live in Georgia and our yard is full of all sorts of large mature trees and also bamboo, oddly enough.