On the hunt, cat and great tits in winter landscape (1881), by Bruno Liljefors (Wikimedia Commons)

While there are rare (and very cute) exceptions, cats and birds do not get along. Cats are predatory by nature; their hunting instinct never goes away. Birds are one of their primary targets—and the fatality statistics are staggering. “There are now over 100 million free-roaming cats in the United States,” according to NYC Bird Alliance (formerly known as NYC Audubon), a nonprofit bird advocacy group. “[T]hey kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year in the U.S. alone, making them the single greatest source of human-caused mortality for birds.” (The other leading killer of birds is also human-caused: window strikes kill as many as one billion birds in the U.S. every year, according to the American Bird Conservancy. Ornithologist Daniel Klem Jr. of Muhlenberg College puts the figure somewhere between 1.28 and 5.19 billion.)

Feral and free-roaming pet cats pose a grave threat to wild bird populations around the globe, with significant ecological consequences. The toll cats take on birds—through direct predation, stress induction, and disruption of nesting behavior—is increasingly well-documented by scientists and conservationists.

“When outside, cats are [an] invasive species that kill birds, reptiles, and other wildlife,” NYC Bird Alliance points out. “But despite being fed, they kill wild birds and other animals by instinct.” Moreover, the domestication of cats has allowed the species to spread and thrive in many regions it might not have otherwise been able to inhabit. However, while the scope of the issue is vast and the ecological consequences are grave, solutions exist to mitigate this ongoing and expanding environmental crisis.

A Global Eco-Crisis

Estimates suggest that domestic cats (Felis catus) might be killing billions of birds each year. A major 2013 study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that free-ranging domestic cats kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds annually in the United States alone. (This figure accounts for both feral cats and free-roaming pet cats, with the majority of the bird deaths attributed to cats without human guardians, which includes those cats in feral colonies, also known as community cats.)

The global picture is similarly grim. In a

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