confused about RSPB's take on cats

Presumably because the RSPB believe what they've written - that cats aren't the biggest issue facing birds, loss of habitat is, so they focus their efforts on the area most likely to see an improvement.  We should probably thank the common moggy for keeping on top of the mice population anyway - with all the dropped seed from us lot feeding the birds, if it wasn't for the local feline population we'd probably be overrun to biblical proportions with the little blighters :-)

I’m not claiming predation is the biggest issue for birds, but it is an issue.

As for what you say about mice - it is so untrue. Harvest mice are listed as a BAP (Biodiversity Action Plan) Species because they are thought to have become much scarcer in recent years and they require conservation plans to reverse the decline. Surveys show dormice have declined in Britain this century, and they are a protected species.

Wood mice are important prey for tawny owls; when numbers of woodland rodents are low, owls may fail to breed. Domestic cats are a major predator of all of these mice and many other species too..

So what would you suggest David ?,it is a topic that crops up often but I think most agree there is no sensible way of controlling cat numbers even if people wanted to.If you scan back through the forum you will see there has been a lot of discussion on this but no real answers.

Around 25 years ago our neighbour had a feral cat living in his garden. It had a litter of kittens & he didn't want them there. So we borrowed a trap from the cats protection league & captured the kittens & finally the mother. The kittens were put up for adoption but the mum was too wild, so after neutering she was released back into the area where she was partially adopted by another neighbour.

If every feral cat was neutered it would make a big difference. Most fat house cats don't kill lots of wildlife, I think it's the feral ones that do the most damage.

David W said:

I’m not claiming predation is the biggest issue for birds, but it is an issue.

As for what you say about mice - it is so untrue. Harvest mice are listed as a BAP (Biodiversity Action Plan) Species because they are thought to have become much scarcer in recent years and they require conservation plans to reverse the decline. Surveys show dormice have declined in Britain this century, and they are a protected species.

Wood mice are important prey for tawny owls; when numbers of woodland rodents are low, owls may fail to breed. Domestic cats are a major predator of all of these mice and many other species too..

Hi David. I thought I’d maybe come in and comment on this subject. I confess to being a cat lover but I won’t say that my cats don’t kill the occasional bird or mouse. I have to say that the figures you quote from the Mammal Society do at first glance look truly horrific but I think if you break this down a bit they are not as terrifying as they first appear to be. You state that 964 cats killed 14000 mammals over a five month period in the study. These figures would suggest that each cat killed 14.5 mammals over this period. Broken down further the kill rate comes down to 2.9 mammals per month which then equates to 0.7 mammals per week leaving us with the figure of 0.1 mammals per day. This would suggest to me, and I’m open to be corrected on the figures, that each of the cats in the study would have killed 1 mammal every 10 days, 24% of which were birds which then equates to approximately one bird every 40 days. The figures are approximate as my maths may not be as good as I would wish and I also think that the figures you mention may have been higher or lower depending on many different factors. I’m certainly no expert so having googled a few figures it would appear that there were between 8-10 million cats in the UK circa 2013. I do freely admit that even one bird every 40 days over these numbers works out at a lot of birds killed by cats in this country but I would also ask you to consider the amount of birds killed by man each year. Once again Goggling some figures shows that there were around 34.5 million registered motor vehicles on the roads in the UK in 2013 and I’m sure that this amount of vehicles caused a considerable amount of fatalities in the bird population due to accidental collisions. I would also add to this habitat loss due to our growing need for more land for more houses and factories; pollution on land and in the sea, pesticides, hunting, overfishing...the list goes on. I often think that by far the biggest threat to birds is man himself. Around the area that I live there are a lot of cats and yet on most days I can count upwards of 70 House Sparrows landing in my garden. Add to this considerable numbers of Starlings mixed in with a good variation of other birds, I don’t see that domestic cats are the villains that you appear to make them out to be. I accept that I'm lucky to have Sparrows and Starlings in this area as I know they are in serious decline, but I suspect that domestic cats are not a huge factor in this. A far as I can see the issues affecting birds seem to be mostly man made due to greed and profit whereas cats are acting through instinct. This is of course only my personal opinion on this and I’m quite sure that my mind won’t be changed, just as I’m sure that your own opinions won’t be changed either.

Kind regards

Paul

Paul, the figures where quoted from this site; I quote "The most recent figures are from the Mammal Society, which estimates that the UK's cats catch up to 275 million prey items a year, of which 55 million are birds. This is the number of prey items that were known to have been caught; we don't know how many more the cats caught, but didn't bring home, or how many escaped but subsequently died."

As to the number of cats - A study, published in the Veterinary Record by Jane Murray, a lecturer in feline epidemiology at Bristol University, suggests there are many more than was thought, about 10.3m cats in the UK, a total of 3m more than pet food manufacturers had estimated.

I have changed my mind on this issue, I used to keep pets that were carnivorans but I have come to realise its an insane thing to do if you love animals. We humans don't need to breed and support millions of cats and dogs which eat and kill other animals.

Whistling Joe - Domestic cats living on the edge of wild areas do the most damage they can wander huge distances; covering up to 69 hectares.

David W said:

Domestic cats living on the edge of wild areas do the most damage they can wander huge distances; covering up to 69 hectares.

The number of cats living on the edge of wild areas is, statistically speaking, negligible though - if indeed there are 10m of them, the vast majority must be living in the middle of towns.

Other figures need taking into consideration as well.  A few years ago, the BTO's opinion was that 100m birds hit windows and a third of them die as a result.

David W said:

This is the number of prey items that were known to have been caught; we don't know how many more the cats caught, but didn't bring home, or how many escaped but subsequently died

This is why I say that statistics should be treated with caution.  This statement is nonsensical from the Mammal Society.  If they were counting catches by the number brought home, they DON'T know that the cat caught the bird at all.  Taking the Mammal Society's figures and mixing with the BTO's, 33m of those "caught" may just as easily have merely been collected by the cat after the bird flew into a window and died.

Whistling Joe - I think you are in denial.

Re Woodmice - We studied predation by approximately 70 domestic cats (Felis catus L.) in the Bedfordshire village of Felmersham over a one-year period. All the prey items brought home by virtually all the cats in the village were recorded and, where possible, identified. A total of 1090 prey items (535 mammals, 297 birds and 258 unidentified animals) were taken, an average of about 14 per cat per year. Twenty two species of birds and 15 species of mammals were identified. The most important items were woodmice (17%), house sparrows (16%) and bank voles (14%).- Predation by domestic cats in an English village, P.B.Churcher1 and J.H.Lawton1,Journal of Zoology

I expect you will claim the woodmice bumped into windows too :)

Te threat of Cats to birds - "Here we conduct a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds annually."  The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States, Scott R. Loss,  Tom Will  & Peter P. Marra  Nature Communications January 2013