Istanbul Wildlife

Its a concrete jungle. In China the cities were huge, but the streets were wide, generally well planted with garden beds, and parks were plentiful - although you generally had to pay to enter. Here the streets are narrow, barely the width of a car, with occasional trees-in-planters struggling for survival.
There are no rats here.
Because there are millions of cats.

Its hard to say which cats are owned and loved and which are strays. They are all well-fed. In our street there are several pet shops, which all put out food and water for the cats. Lots of other people seem to do so too. Side-walk restaurants have cats slinking around begging customers for a bite to eat - and people feed them. I have never seen anyone being unkind or unfriendly to a cat, but then rarely will anyone stroke one either.

Then there are the birds. Pigeons of course, like you expect to see in a city. In Taksim someone tried to sell us a packet of food to feed the pigeons there. You mostly see the pigeons in the city squares, as you would expect.
There are seagulls, too. In Perth we have a lot of seagulls, being an seaside city. They can be mildly annoying, and are considered unhealthy to have around because they feed at the rubbish dump. Istanbul is a seaside place too, and so there are seagulls - the big kind. Compared to our little Perth birds they are huge and scary. I recently saw one devouring a dead pigeon, and it was much bigger than the pigeon. [I say this for our kids, who were used to seeing little doves in our back garden and were greatly startled when one day a pigeon arrived.]

Here we sit like birds on the windowsill

When I was a kid we used to sing "Here we sit like birds in the wilderness ...waiting to be fed" Never really understood that. No wilderness here, just windowsills ...
There are doves here too. They have learnt that people can provide food, and so they apparently watch the apartment windows for any sign of movement. As soon as they see someone, they alight on the windowsill and pace up and down peering in with first one eye then the other ...This brought back happy memories of home and the doves' nests on our patio, and so Peter decided to make it easier for them - and us - and built them a special little bird feeder shelf on our kitchen windowsill.

The birds seem to like this arrangement, and often sit on the shelf waiting for us to feed them - unless they see someone else open a window somewhere and then they flutter off to investigate.
One day there was a dead cat on the ground underneath our bird shelf, with a scattering of damp crumbs on its fur. We're guessing it thought the shelf was a cat-feeding platform with birds supplied.
Some days the doves tell us they are tired of breadcrumbs. After all, that's what everyone gives them. What they really like is cornflake crumbs. They climb right up on the ledge against the glass and peer in onto the kitchen bench to see what we have.