Well, I left the cat alone last night and went to bed, but set my alarm clock an hour early because I wanted to see how hot the metal railing could get. Unlike the first cat who's on the bottom of it and only in contact with the railing by the cremaster, this one as you could see was actually resting against the railing on its side.
Well, good thing I set the alarm early (and I still awoke a half hour before the alarm), as I looked out the window, the cat was still attached, but seemed to have reversed the J form where it seemed to be reaching out. Just above it at the top of the railing was a blue jay! I scared the blue jay off and decided to do an emergency "surgery" to move the cat. As of that point, it had not yet begun to shed it's final skin. I had no idea how difficult it would be!
As I was slicing with a credit card, I felt like I was making no progress and worse, felt like I was hurting the cat somehow. Well, after a bit of struggle I finally managed to get it free. It had curled back up into an O shape, so I grabbed the bit of silk that was dangling from the cremaster and held on to it by that and it sort of drooped back to the J shape.
So there I stood with a cat hanging on...and I realized I had no way to attach it. I couldn't tie a knot of any kind with that little amount of "string" on the end, I had no glue, I'd even thrown out an old roll of tape from the last hurricane that had gone bad. Could I just sit there and hold it until it molted? Nope. Looking around...I spotted a sticker on one of the plants that I bought a week ago. Now, where to hang it from? The end results:
I went downstairs, had some breakfast and about an hour later I came back up:
So it seems you can move it while it's still a cat, but it's probably not the best idea. Oh yeah...you can see on the top of the second pic there, there's left over "skin" from the cat. I didn't remove that until about an hour ago. I figured I'd let the pupa harden first before I mess with it.
