Meet the Instagram-famous Maverick, who readers named the cutest cat in Whatcom County

Maverick, an eight-year-old mixed-breed cat who lives in southern Bellingham, has more bandanas than you do.

“He just is so good at sitting and taking photos. I would reach out to brands that were looking for ambassadors, and he ended up being a brand ambassador for like five different companies,” Maverick’s owner Barbara Wahli told the Bellingham Herald. “I have like 300 bandanas and scarves for him. It’s kind of insane.”

A cat with a social media following

It’s not just Wahli who thinks that Maverick is photogenic – the cat has an Instagram page that’s amassed roughly 17,400 followers.

“I have a marketing background, so I just really ramped up his page when I first adopted him, and just kept following people, communicating with people, and just growing his presence,” Wahli said. “Then once he started modeling, it just kind of grew. And, you know, it’s crazy. Cats and Instagram are the greatest combination, because so many cats have so many followers.”

The account contains nearly 2,000 pictures of Maverick, many of which come from his and Wahli’s adventures across the U.S. in their van.

“He has done 50,000 miles with me in the van,” Wahli said. “He’s a true adventure cat. He has explored most of the west coast, and he’s even been on a plane to Florida. He’s a really great van cat – one of the original van cats, I’m gonna say.”

Maverick’s following goes beyond his Instagram page or even the blog posts that Wahli writes from the cat’s perspective.

“He’s got some super fans,” Wahli said. “There’s people who comment on every single post and send me messages. He gets Christmas cards from cat accounts.”

Those fans, along with our readers, helped him win our contest to find the cutest cat in Whatcom County. Maverick received 33,906 votes in the competition’s final round, more than the other nine finalists combined. Maverick also received the most votes in the first round of the contest, with 525.

Maverick moved to Bellingham nearly four years ago from San Jose, California, where he’d lived since Wahli adopted him in 2016.

“[He and his siblings] had lost their mama,” Wahli said. “They were all malnutritioned, like four weeks old, and I discovered him from a shelter that was fostering him when he was about six months old, and he adopted me. I didn’t adopt him. I’m going to be honest, I was kind of apprehensive, because he’s really shy around people and the lady was like, ‘You know what? Just take him overnight. He’s gonna warm up to you.’ Literally, within 20 minutes of being at my house, he plopped over and kind of looked at me, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, you adopted me.’”

Maverick, a mixed-breed cat whose DNA test revealed that he is primarily Savannah, ragdoll and Russian blue, chose his own name too, according to Wahli.

“I read a list of outlaw names from A to Z, and when I said Maverick, he meowed,” Wahli said. “So I said his name again, and he meowed a second time. Went through the rest of the list, and then at the end, I’m like, ‘Maverick,’ and he meowed a third time.”

However, the Pacific Northwest might not have been the cat’s first choice.

“First few months, he did not want to go outside,” Wahli said. “It was also winter. There was snow, he never saw snow before. I lived in Sudden Valley, and so the deer would walk by, and he’d be like, what are those?”

In recent years, though, he’s taken to Bellingham. Wahli calls him a “good PNW cat” and he’s even modeled a bandana inspired by his hometown’s green and blue flag. The design was fittingly called “The Bellingham,” and now its model owns the unofficial title of the city’s cutest cat.

How the other finalists fared

While they didn’t come close to Maverick’s vote total, a pair of other cats approached the 10,000 vote mark. Jack, a two-year-old bicolor American shorthair, received 9,608 votes.

“He’s the happiest cat I’ve ever met,” his owners said in a phone call with the Herald. You know, he just, he smiles and he looks in your eyes and talks to you… He just started off very special, and he stayed that way.”

Jack, who also came in second in the first round of our contest, is an avid bird watcher and fetch player.

“He’s a very happy, very playful cat,” his owners said. “He’s two years old now, and it’s not slowed down. He’s almost like having a puppy. He chirps. He makes all these playful sounds. He talks to us. He plays fetch.”

Mia, a gray cat from eastern Whatcom County, took third place with 8,260 votes.