Where to find cats in your neighbourhood

Walk your street at seven in the morning. Then walk the same street at two in the afternoon. The first walk has cats in it. The second one mostly has parked cars.

Cats are rarely scarce in a neighbourhood. They are on a schedule, and the schedule is not the same as yours. Once you know the hours and the handful of surfaces they keep choosing, a street you have walked for years starts handing you three or four cats a week.

Nothing below involves calling a cat over, feeding it, or going anywhere you have not been invited.

The two busy hours

Cats are crepuscular. They are most active around dawn and dusk, which is also when the small animals they hunt are moving. That is not a quirk of one cat, it is how the species is wired, and it is the single most useful thing to know if you want to see them.

In practice, the first hour of proper daylight and the last hour before dark are the two windows worth protecting in your day. Morning is when pet cats get let out and go on patrol. Evening is when they come back through the gardens, and when the cats that live outdoors start moving properly.

The middle of the day is not empty, it is just still. A sleeping cat is easy to walk past. Midday cats are horizontal, tucked into something warm, and usually above or below your eyeline rather than in front of it.

Season shifts the windows. In hot weather activity slides towards the cool ends of the day and into the night. In cold weather it compresses into the middle, wherever the sun is landing. After heavy rain stops, give it twenty minutes and walk again, because cats sit rain out and then move.

Warm surfaces are the first thing to scan

Cats are comfortable at temperatures that feel too warm to us, so they spend a lot of their day arranging themselves around heat sources. Learn the warm spots on your route and you have learned half the cats.

• Car bonnets, for an hour or two after the engine has been run. In winter this is the most reliable spot on any residential street
• Boiler flues and extractor vents on outside walls, especially on the back of a laundrette, a takeaway or a block of flats
• The warm air spilling out of a shop doorway in winter
• Windowsills, doorsteps and porches that face the sun, and brick or stone walls that have been in the sun all day and hold their heat into the evening
• Flat roofs over kitchen extensions and garages, which warm early and stay dry
• Greenhouses, garden centre benches, and stacked compost bags

Look higher than you think

Most people scan for cats at knee height, because that is where a cat is when it is walking towards you. Cats at rest do the opposite. They pick a spot with a view and an exit, which usually means up.

• The tops of garden walls and fence panels, particularly where two fences meet at a corner
• Shed roofs, garage roofs, coal bunkers, and the lids of wheelie bins
• Car roofs and bootlids, which are warm and give a clear view of the street
• Stacked pallets, low branches, and the flat top of a gatepost
• Window ledges on the first floor, and the inside of upstairs windows

Change what you do with your eyes. Walk with your gaze at roof and wall height and drop it only when something moves. You will find cats you have walked under for years.

Cover, edges and the lines cats travel

Cats do not cross open ground if there is an edge to follow. If you can trace a continuous line of cover from one side of a car park to the other, that is the line a cat will use.

• Hedges, fence lines and the strip of overgrown verge behind a bus stop
• The gap between parked cars and the kerb
• Back lanes and alleys behind terraced houses, and the bin stores in flats
• Garage blocks and the scrub behind them
• Allotments, which combine cover, sheds, water butts and mice
• Railway embankments and canal towpaths, viewed from the public path only
• Churchyards and cemeteries, which are quiet, walled, and full of low stone that holds warmth

Food, water and community cats

Cats that live outdoors organise themselves around a reliable food source. That is why harbours, fishing quays, boatyards, farm shops, stables and the bin areas behind restaurants hold cats so consistently. Industrial estates and business parks are worth a weekend walk for the same reason, with the added advantage that nobody is there.

University campuses, caravan parks and older housing estates often have a cat or two that everyone locally knows. So do a lot of hardware shops, bookshops, garden centres and cafes. If a shop has a resident cat, ask the person behind the counter before you take a photograph. It is their cat and their shop, and they will usually tell you its name and its schedule for free.

If you see a cat with a small straight notch cut from the tip of one ear, that cat has been neutered and returned as part of a managed colony. Somebody is already feeding it and keeping an eye on it. It is a sign of care, not neglect.

Do not bring food. A cat you do not know may be owned, may be on a prescription diet, and may be pulled across a road by the smell of what you are holding. Feeding at a roadside verge is how cats get hit by cars. Water is different only in that it matters more in a heatwave, and that is a job for the people who live there, not for a visitor with a camera.

Build a route you can walk again

One good walk finds you a cat. A repeatable route finds you the same cats, and knowing individual cats is the part that actually gets interesting.

1. Pick twenty to forty minutes of walking that starts and ends at your door
2. String it through the categories above. Two or three streets with front gardens and parked cars, one back lane, one patch of green, one warm commercial corner
3. Walk it at the same time on three separate mornings before you judge it
4. Then walk the same route in the hour before sunset, because it will produce a different set of cats
5. Write down every cat you see with a landmark and a time. The garage roof on Mill Lane at half six. The tabby on the wall outside the chip shop
6. After a fortnight, cut the dead stretches and add the streets that keep producing

Cats keep routines, which is the whole reason this works. A cat that was on a particular wall at half six on Tuesday is a decent bet for half six on Thursday. That is also why a bad walk means very little. Weather, bin day, roadworks and a strange dog all clear a street for an evening.

The rules that keep this kind

Every cat you find is either someone's pet or a cat that has learned to survive around people. Both deserve to end the encounter no more stressed than they started it.

• Stay on public ground. Pavements, parks, towpaths, public car parks and open shop forecourts. A cat sitting in a front garden is photographed from the pavement or not at all. Never open a gate, never go down a driveway, never step onto private land
• Never chase, corner or block a cat's way out. If it is between you and a wall, you have already made a mistake. Move sideways and give it the gap
• Do not pick up a cat you do not know. Kittens on their own usually have a mother close by who is out getting food, so leave them where they are
• Crouch down, turn slightly side on, and look away rather than staring. A slow blink is read as friendly. Standing over a cat is read as a threat
• Learn the no. Flattened ears, a hard stare, a low twitching tail, a crouch, or backing away all mean stop. Take the photograph you have and walk on
• No flash, and put your phone on silent. A startled cat is a cat that will not be there tomorrow
• If a cat looks injured or unwell, do not handle it. Note exactly where it is and ring a local vet or rescue

What to do with the cat once you have found it

Take the photograph from where you are standing. Keep the whole encounter to a minute or two. Then leave the cat where it was, doing what it was doing, so the next person gets to meet it as well.

If you want the walk to keep score, that is what PoCats is for. You photograph a cat you have actually met, the photo is checked to confirm it is a real live cat and cut from its background, and that cutout is the card in your album; nothing draws the cat. The map remembers where you met each one, which turns out to be the fastest way to learn your own neighbourhood's schedule. It is free, there is no advertising in it, and your photos are never shown to other players.

The route is the part that matters, though. Build a good one and you will meet the cats whether you install anything or not.

Questions people ask

Free tools for your next cat encounter

Make a keepsake with the cat card maker, using a photo you own. For your next walk, the body language decoder reads a cat's tail, ears and eyes back to you, and the street cat name generator names the one that has been sitting on your wall all summer.

Where this fits in PoCats

PoCats is a cat spotting game: you photograph a real cat you meet, it is checked as a living animal, and it becomes a collectible card cut from your own picture. The catch itself is a two-second timing moment you can try in your browser, and the whole loop is explained here.