[Steve_In_Cheshire]

Ive had a problem with a cat recently thats stalking the birds, it hides in the plants and bushes ready to pounce, its an evil looking shabby thing.

The shape of my garden is similar to a football pitch but not a football pitch size lol, its quite long at about 70ft and about 30ft in width. Its the usual set up with the house at one end and a perimeter wall at the opposite end that seperates us from a house opposite which also has large some trees, down the sides of the garden we have wooden fencing that seperates the other gardens omn either side of us and the normal thing like bushes and plants.

I found a dead greenfinch recently at the top end of the garden where the wall and trees are, its head was missing. At the top end of the garden where i found this dead greenfinch is where i had my bird table which stood about 15 feet away from the wall and trees and i also had a ground feeding table on the floor about 6f off the wall filled with seed and sunflower hearts, ive had some great visitors to both the bird table and ground table.

On the ground table we get the usual like greenfinches, goldfinches, the chaffinches occasionally hop on as well, blue tits, great tits, cole tits, robins, blackbirds, pigeons, doves and my pride and joy is that i have 2 resident male reed buntings that visit daily.

This shabbly, evil looking cat sits on the back wall sometimes which is where the blackbirds hang out along with a lot of other birds as they like to congregate in the trees, the starlings roost during the day in one of the large trees, when the cat comes into the garden it walks along the bottom of the wall where the ground feeding table is. My main concern is the welfare of the birds with having this thing around and i`m not kidding when i say it looks like the devil.

What i have done is ive moved the bird table to the opposite end of the garden and its now about 15ft in front of the house and about 10 ft in from the borders, ive moved the bird bath as well and the ground feeding table closer to the house.

Will this have a knock on effect to the amount of daily visitors we get, i`m concerned that the reed buntings won`t come now because where the ground table was before it was very natural with trees and some bushes and they used to like to sit in the bushes and trees before they came down to feed.

Now the food is at the top end of the garden in front of the house is i`m a bit concerned of possible bird strikes on the windows and also a lack of daily visitors, birds come to rely on a daily food source and i feel a bit bad about moving that away from where it used to be and where they felt comfortable feeding, i have the birds best interests in mind here as seeing dead birds isn`t a nice sight and i want to protect them the best i can.

Does anyone have any opinions ?