Night of the Child-Eating Ninja Cat?

When I was one and sucked my thumb I ran away to se-
Sorry, wrong start.

Last night I was lying in bed, being asleep (as is often the done thing) when I woke up (as is generally the way to conclude a period of sleep). At first I thought I had been woken by a dream which I will now describe.

I was reading a comic about some girls fighting zombies (no idea where that came from) but for some reason I cannot explain, I was only able to read tiny parts of the comic at a time, and in no logical order, so I was desperately trying to work out what was going on, util my dream brain gave up and woke the rest of me up so I could work out what it was all about. Lying in bed half asleep I spent a few minutes trying to make sense of it before I realised that it was a dream and therefore didn't make sense.

So I was awake, trying to fall back to sleep, when there was this frankly bizarre sound outside my window; WAA-OOOOooooww!
It honestly sounded just like a small child, like one or two years old, wailing away to the world.
Now I live quite close to a council estate and would not be surprised to find a two-year-old child wandering the streets at what transpired to be 4:45AM.
A few moments later the sound came again, WAA-OOOOooooww!
After that it started coming every few seconds and I was really perplexed; I could imagine a child wailing in distress that way once but a child who wants attention will sob, make all sorts of sounds, call out fragments of the words it knows. I went to the window and looked out but couldn't see anything. I got back into bed and the sound came again.

I was genuinely wondering if I should call the police when the noise went slightly differently; WAA-OOOOooWEOW! Reow! *Crash, sound of wheely bin falling over* Reow meow weeeeow!!!

So, either the child was eaten by a neighbour's cat or the whole display was in fact two cats battling for dominance over my stepdad's bird table.
The noise stopped after that, though by this point I'd been expending so much thought to the issue that I had awoken sufficiently for my body to think it was time to get up and started firing all the little alarms of life to get one to take care of ones body that had been previously switched off to sleep.

I overslept five minutes and missed my bus, so I had to get the later, more expensive bus so as to avoid being late for college and missing the exam I had/am having this morning. The losers' bus, as it were.


So the question I present to all you strange and hairy people is:

Should this incident ever be repeated, how, with the minimum expenditure of time and effort, does one stop two cats fighting for dominance in one's garden when one has to get up at Stupid AM the next morning to get a bus to college and there take an exam that, while not that difficult, will be rather fiddly and therefore require the maximum possible quantity of concentration?