The Cats that Kill the Birds…

Submitted by a Reader in Sydney, Australia

Australian pussies kill more than one million birds each day –Report

Australian academics estimate cats kill about four percent of the population of about 11 billion native birds across the country each year.

“… the amount of predation is staggering, and is likely to be driving the ongoing decline of many species,” said a senior academic at Charles Darwin University.

“We found records of cats killing 338 species of native birds, of which 71 were threatened species… That’s about 60 per cent of the threatened species in Australia,” said another academic at Australian National University.

Study Highlights:

• 377m birds killed by cats annually (or more than one million per day)
• 99 pct of the victims, or 373m, are native Australian birds
• 316m birds killed by feral cats; 61m killed by domestic cats
• 338 species of native Australian birds had been killed, including 71 threatened species

Where did they get the idea from?

“Our tally of bird deaths is comparable to similar estimates for other countries. Our figure is lower than a recent estimate for the United States, and slightly higher than in Canada. Overall, bird killings by cats seem to greatly outnumber those caused by humans,” the report authors say.

Bird Mortality Rates in the US

“[…] free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality.”

“Domestic cats (Felis catus) are predators that humans have introduced globally and that have been listed among the 100 worst non-native invasive species in the world. Free-ranging cats on islands have caused or contributed to 33 (14%) of the modern bird, mammal and reptile extinctions recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.”

“Numerous anthropogenic mortality sources directly kill birds. Cause-specific annual mortality in the United States varies from billions (cat predation) to hundreds of millions (building and automobile collisions), tens of millions (power line collisions), millions (power line electrocutions, communication tower collisions), and hundreds of thousands (wind turbine collisions).” [Deaths from disease, and culling, are NOT included.]