NASHVILLE — I first saw it in bits — two paws here, the tip of a tail there — on grainy, black-and-white images taken by our backyard trail camera. Normally that device captures only the wild animals you’d expect to find in a first-ring suburb: opossums, mainly, but also rabbits and raccoons and rat snakes, sometimes an owl, now and then a fox. I once saw a bobcat slink across our street, but it’s never shown up in the trail-cam photos. My heart lifted when I first saw a clearly feline haunch in one of the pictures, but the scale was all wrong for a bobcat. It was just an ordinary house cat, prowling in my backyard.

Soon the cat was showing up in the daytime, too, apparently drawn by the leftover bits of lunches left around the construction site two doors down from our house. He was a ragged, battle-scarred tom, thin but not emaciated, with one eye that didn’t open all the way. A feral cat, not someone’s cherished pet.

As we passed my husband’s car in the driveway one morning, my skittish rescue dog darted away from the tires, spooked by something under the car. I squatted down for a look. The feral cat hissed at me.

Let me just say it, flat out: If I owned a gun, I swear I would have shot that cat. I would have chased that hissing cat out from under the car without a thought and shot it as it fled.

I wish you could see all the baby birds in our yard. Baby towhees and robins, baby redbirds and bluebirds. Two broods of house finches and two broods of house wrens. One morning, an ungainly fledgling crow sat nearby and rustled its feathers, yelling for food like a giant nestling. A fuzzy screech owl chick spent an entire day staring wide-eyed at me from a tree near our back deck while its mother dozed beside it.

We’ve had baby downy woodpeckers and red-bellied woodpeckers, baby white-breasted nuthatches and northern flickers. All summer long, they have been taking their wobbly maiden flights from branch to fence post, from cherry laurel to holly hedge. They try to land on the birdbath and miss altogether. They fly to the ground to catch an insect and then can’t figure out how to take off again.

Our bug-averse neighbors poison every crawling or flying thing in sight, but my husband and I have spent the last 25 years trying to make a haven here for wildlife, including the insects that pollinate flowers and feed reptiles and birds. Maybe you can picture these adorable baby birds and this flowering, insect-friendly yard. If so, you might forgive me for losing my mind a bit when the feral cat showed up.

I was thinking of the first nest the bluebirds built this spring, the one in which not a single baby survived. I was thinking of the gravid broadhead skink who would lie on our stoop every afternoon, warming her egg-swollen body in the sun. She disappeared one day to lay her eggs and guard her nest, I assumed, but now I wasn’t sure. I was thinking of the chipmunk who lives in a tunnel under our stoop and of the little screech owl, its feet holding down some small prey, its eyes glowing in the infrared light of our trail camera.

The more I thought about those vulnerable creatures, already crowded out by construction and starved out by insecticides, the angrier I got at the feral tom. In truth, I would never kill a cat, but I can surely hate one with a murderous rage. A person who has spent a quarter-century trying to create an oasis for wildlife can go a little mad when a cat shows up in the photos on her trail camera.