Neighborhood domination
The lawn looks pretty good right now.
Moxie was one of the many "strays" in the 'hood before he was adopted, so it's not a surprise that he learned to fend for himself. I guess that year he intermittently received sustenance from the neighbor down the street and our front porch he formed a hunting habit.
The carnage began soon after the kitty was fixed and given his shots (the signs of a true cat/human commitment).

I took the first gifts as a thank-you:
• For giving him a roof over his head when that scary hail storm occurred.
• For giving him wet food and a spiffy new collar.
• For not hauling him away in a cage like the four other kittens in our yard.

While I regularly practice organic pest control by patrolling my yard at night to squash snails, I'm thinking seven pocket gophers in nine days is a bit excessive.
We've already spotted at least one more pregnant stray in the 'hood. You'd think Moxie would leave some of the bounty for his former street buddies. Or maybe this is his way of marking his territory. By ensuring that other cats will not be able to survive from catching rodents in Bob's empty lot, maybe Moxie thinks the cat will move down the block.

Then he conquered a scrub jay. These birds are pretty feisty and I started to worry a bit, thinking that if the jay was able to be caught, there might have been something wrong with it. Perhaps the jay drank fermented pyracantha berries or had some new-and-yet-to-be-diagnosed bird disease.

While the kitty does not appear to eat the rodents, the jay was almost entirely devoured, except for one blue wing that remained as a temporal monument to his victory.
As for the rodents, we've taken some time to figure out what they may be. At first I did not want to closely inspect them -- you know, the blood and guts factor. But since then I've hardened and was able to look the dead guys in the eye and note the four yellowed, beaver-esque teeth, elongated fingers and approximately three-inch tail.

We think they're pocket gophers, which are common to this area.
Moxie must be liberating the entire neighborhood of pocket gophers, which accounts for the nights with the full moon when he stayed out well past my bed time.
If I had known his hunting would become an obsession, I would have started counting from the very beginning. At this point I would guess that his kill count is up to about a dozen since the adoption was official in February.

In the past nine days we've had seven "gifts," half delivered to the bedroom rug and the remainder in the once pock-marked lawn.
What's amazing is that there are this many rodents nearby. No doubt his victories are encouraged by the open lot behind Bob's metal shed a few doors down.

I did a Web search on record-breaking mousers and found several sites that talk about Towser, a tortoise-shell cat who "worked for" a Scottish distillery. From 1963 to 1987, this cat is said to have caught 28,899 mice. I'm curious as to how this was documented.
At least for now, my original delight at the cat's domination of the subterranean world has waned.