Courtesy of Gigi Ford

When students living in Brunswick Apartments do their laundry, walk to class or throw away their garbage, sometimes, a small, fluffy shape follows them. Although she has an owner, the “Bruns Cat” is an outdoor pet that many in the Brunswick Apartments community feed and take care of.

Sophia Tottene-Darvas ’25 lives in Brunswick Apartments and also lived there in her sophomore year, when she and her roommates became fast friends with the cat.

“The cat made us happy,” Tottene-Darvas said. “I think that’s why we struck up a relationship with the cat. We have pets at home, and we miss them. And he’s very sweet. It got to the point where we could call him, and he’d come.”

The cat also wanders around Warmings Market, a deli located on Maine Street. Miguel Pavón ’25, who was shooting his short film “Lucky Night” in the Brunswick area, included the cat in the first scene of the film.

“We were just doing our thing, and all of a sudden, there was a cat,” Pavón said. “Everyone just stopped what they were doing, and were like ‘Oh my God, there’s a cat here!’ It was a nice moment. Everyone just sort of stopped doing what they were doing to appreciate this animal on our set.”

Last summer, Gigi Ford ’27 made friends with the cat, feeding it bits of her meals and, occasionally, some cat treats. Ford calls the cat Minerva (“Minnie” for short). However, she has come to grow worried about the cat’s hygiene.

“She’s a very sweet girl. She likes wet treats, those squeezy treats,” Ford said. “She has [fur] mats I can’t get at, under her jaw around her neck area. She lets me scratch them, but she has not let me cut them off yet.”

Ford has also noted that the cat often tries to get into the Apartments.

“She likes to try to get inside,” Ford said. “For the record, I do not let her get inside. But a couple weeks ago, I was coming down the stairs to do my laundry, and she was in the staircase meowing.”

Over the summer, the Bruns Cat got stuck in a dorm room. It was eventually found by Nikki Harris ’26, John Schubert ’26 and Sara Coughlin ’26, who called Bowdoin Security. This incident, along with the cat’s proclivity towards walking into the dorms, worried Tottene-Darvas.

“What if over break a few people are moving stuff, and he slips into an apartment again?” Tottene-Darvas said. “The way that they found out that he was in there is [that] he’d been screaming for a few days. That’s not great.”

The cat also likes to lay down in sunspots in the parking lot. Ford, as well as Ryan Delaney ’25, Tottene-Darvas’s roommate, also warned that students in cars should be careful when backing out of the Bruns parking lot.

“If you’re not familiar with the cat being there, it could easily be hit, especially if you’re backing up,” Delaney said. “If you don’t see it, it could be bad. There were a couple times when my roommates and I were leaving our apartment in our car, and we knew the cat was there, and we had to be super intentional while backing up.”

Delaney weighed the pros and cons of students’ involvement in the cat’s health.

“[Bowdoin students feeding the cat] could disrupt its habits and cause it to be more reliant on the students,” Delaney said. “I’ve seen it, this year, lying more in the parking lot where it could get hurt. It’s very sweet that [students] are feeding it, but it’s caused the cat to hang out more in the parking lot.”

Ford, however, noted that despite the Bruns Cat having an owner, she still wants to help her out.

“I think she has a house,” Ford said. “It’s across the street from Bruns. I’m not 100 percent sure, but I would rather take care of her than not.”

Sara Coughlin ’26, Nikki Harris ’26 and John Schubert ’26 are members of The Bowdoin Orient.