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

© CounterPunch