By in large this is what we do…but the seed droppings from the thistle feeder and the plateform feeder always fall down below it and the little forest pickers like the wrens and juncos are happy to scrounge up all those fallen seeds.
I had no idea how efficiently our cats had cleansed the garden until they had all died and the birds came back, how strange the bird song sounded!
If our Joe wasn’t fat and lazy I’d collar him with one of those bell collars that my girlfriend has put on her three.
Oh, knock it off. I scanned through wiki’s list of extinct birds. Most of them were too big to blame on cats, and many more were too fast or fierce to be threatened by cats. The famous passenger pigeon was hunted out of existence by man, due to a really unfortunate species-specific behavior. When a few of the flock were hurt, the rest would return to ground. :smack:
Most of America’s original predators (fox, mink, weasel, etc.) were nearly wiped out by farmers and trappers long ago. We have no idea how many birds roamed our continent before we killed the small predators and imported our own. Many communities are overbunnied and have too many squirrels, chipmunks, and mice. If anything, we need more cats, not fewer. It would be the natural thing to repopulate the foxes and minks, but I don’t know of anyone pushing that program.
WTF?? This is what cats do. It’s instinct. Even if a pet cat is well fed by its owners, it will still hunt given the chance. You should address your anger to people who don’t mount their bird feeders out of cats’ reach.
Their actual preferred prey is rodents, but these are not as common as they once were in prosperous industrial societies. This is one reason some cats hunt birds.
This part of Connecticut has a decent population of Mink, as there were farms raising it before the depression - Then they let a lot of them go, and some escaped…and now we have quite the population going 
Correct. Which is why responsible cat ownership entails keeping them indoors.
And what about ground-nesting birds? Cats can make life untenable for them.
As you note above, cats hunt instictively. Anything of an appropriate size, that’s moving, and in view is of interest. You can trigger this instinct by tying pretty much anything on a string and dangling it in reach - it doesn’t have to look, smell or even much resemble a rodent.
I don’t give a shit. I like birds and don’t have a cat outside. A stray comes around it’s getting an ass booting if I catch it eating the birds. I’m a predator too.
You sit watching an invasive species decimate a native population? Don’t you have a rifle or a trap?
(Assuming it’s legal to kill feral cats in your locality, of course).
A) - Do you realize what my wife would do if I shot a cat?
B) - Do you consider cats an invasive species?
This is really reaching.
We killed ALL the small predators, therefore it is up to us to “fix” things by encouraging alien ones? We may not have any idea of the exact number of birds in North America before we got here but we can be pretty sure it was higher than it is now.
I haven’t read many articles about places overrun with squirrels and chipmunks but I have read plenty of articles about how native predators like foxes, coyotes and fishers have adapted to suburban and even urban conditions and are much more common than they were 50 years ago. Cites available upon request.
(Interesting. You argue that cats should be encouraged to keep down exploding rodent populations, and Spectre of Pithecanthropus claims that cats only hunt birds because rodents, their preferred prey, aren’t common enough. Get your story straight, people!)
House cats are.
- They are not native, and bird populations certainly haven’t evolved to co-exist with them.
- They exist in huge and growing numbers.
- They can have a significant effect on native species.
Of course they’re an invasive species. What possible argument could there be to the contrary?
If these events were occuring in my yard, Mr. Tom Cat would have an important meeting with a .17 HMR. The .17 HMR is so utterly perfect for cat elimination that it’s like the good people at Hornady sat down to design a cartridge expressly for the purpose. Low noise, no over penetration, no recoil, tremendous accuracy, extreme lethality…it’s just so perfect! No cat has ever required more than a single round IME to be DRT.
Stray domestic cats are exactly analagous to Japanese beetles, tent worms, corn borers, zebra mussels, and other imported pests. Eliminating feline pests bears no more guilt than putting a bag-a-bug trap in the yard to keep the Japanese beetles from destroying the plants.
Just put up a sign: “Warning: Predator cats in the area. Eat at your own risk”
Sheesh, you people always make things so complicated.
I agree the 17 cal. magnums are probably the most accurate round I know of - espeically with my marlin, buffalo barrel and all…but I don’t shoot cats, I want to stay married.
I’ll agree cats - especially those of the ferrel variety - are invasive. But watching this guy grab some sparrows didin’t really phase me, and I am an avid birder.
Can we get some Alien birds as well? That’d definitely be worth watching in the backyard.
It is the stupid people who don’t spay/neuter who are to blame. I like birds, but I can’t fault a cat for following its instincts. That is why mine stay safely indoors.
Exactly, as do mine. They can watch from a distance. Also, we have a basement where sometimes, every once in a while, a field mouse will venture in there and the tag-team-twins a.k.a attack siamese will grab them and torture then until they die, then they will bring them up to our bedroom and lay them before the bed. This has happened a few times, and each time there is never any blood on the mouse, as if it died of fright - or a heart attack
Our local feral cat population has declined quite a bit ever since a pair of bald eagles moved into the neighborhood over a year ago.
I consider it a win-win situation.
Ditto. We have enough large birds-of-prey here that stray cats & pupppies don’t last long enough to do much damage.
Count me in as somebody who’d gladly support extermination campaigns against feral members of pet species wherever they’re putting meaningful pressure on wildlife. Humans are pressuring the natives enough as it is; we sure don’t need to be adding to it with feral cats & pack dogs which give us no benefit.