Cats, like other animals respond to a number of stimuli in order to find prey, avoid predators, etc. As a wildlife photographer, I try to think about what what senses make the animal I want to capture so successful, and use them to my advantage. In a basic sense: how does the animal see the world. In the "cat world" audio and visual stimuli can entice a cat's curiosity to come in close. In my experience for Canines it's all about smell, where as cats you use a visual attractor to get them to the site, and scent to hold them there, for canines scent can do both. It doesn't have to be something expensive, just something out of the ordinary, like a feather or a CD that will dance in the gentlest breeze.
On this set I had an audio caller playing at dark at 30 second intervals. I was expecting to get photo's of the cat coming in to the camera, but didn't expect him to sit down in front of it. I will have to change the camera placement next time I use the technique. On another note, this is a perfect example of why you should turn the time/date stamps off of your camera. The time/date is automatically stored in the file data and can ruin a nice picture if you choose to display it. Lesson learned.
