Threat to Native Bird Species - The Common Cat

[webmaster]

I was a little disturbed the other day when I read in the New Yorker Magazine wind power generators kill up to four hundred thousand birds per year, which is probably more than are killed in oil spills. But outdoor cats kill up to 500 million birds.

According to this [url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/science/21birds.html?_r=1&hpw]article in the NYTimes[/url]:

[quote]The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines. “I hope we can now stop minimizing and trivializing the impacts that outdoor cats have on the environment and start addressing the serious problem of cat predation,â€

[Kisal]

I 100% agree! The domestic cat should be an indoor pet.

I'm sorely tempted to set out a trap for my neighbor's cat. He hangs out in my yard, catching birds. I could trap him and take him to the pound and they'd never know what happened to him.

[rainbowgardener]

Yes, I think all cats should be spayed/neutered and in general your pet cats should stay indoors. But we also feed outdoors 4 stray cats that have adopted us (that we did get spayed/neutered). They make sure we don't have any trouble with rats/mice, etc. And yes they do get the occasional bird, mostly ones we have way too many of. Sorry, birders, but there has to be a top predator. We don't have hawks or owls here in the city, much less foxes and other things that might catch birds. If we didn't have some predator, the birds would become a plague just as the deer have, also beautiful animals in themselves. 500 million sounds like a lot, but how many would have been taken in the natural setting in with native predators?

Here's a list that Audubon puts out of bird species that are suffering declining numbers:

https://birds.audubon.org/species-by-program/cbid

Look the list over and it will become very obvious that it is not in most cases cats causing this decline, it is habitat loss!

(Incidentally how did the common grackle get on this list -- if anyone is missing some grackles, they can have some of ours!)