Raising baby birds.

[Jim Ford]

We've had a recent run on threads of the form - 'Our cat has brought in a baby ....'. I normally try to ignore the posts and grit my teeth, but I just can't let it pass.

It beats me why anyone who cares the slightest about wildlife would choose to keep a cat!!

Jim

[rossy]

without question cats are by far the the biggest killers of birds in my book , and at this time of the year they are bad news for chicks as they dont have a clue of the danger they are in, infact the cats are bad news at any time, rossy

[feathered-friend]

No doubt this thread is going to cause some debate!

Its been several years since we had cats and I do like cats. I like birds too but did not get the birds where we used to live. Probably due to it being an urban area with little natural habitat for wildlife. There were lots of cats about but obviously not the primary reason for lack of wildlife in built up areas.

Where we are now, it is semi-rural and I get many varieties of birds and there is much wildlife. Recently I was offered a kitten, children very keen, but I refused, firstly because I like having the birds and secondly because each week I see young cats lying dead on the busy road which runs through the village.

Yesterday I saw a family of blue tits fledge, the babies were in more danger from my young 6mth old yorkie and the local jays and magpies than the cats around here. And there is lots of cats in the village!

My point is, not having a cat is a choice I made because of where we live now and the danger it would be to wildlife, but if I lived in an urban area I cannot see that a cat would make a great impact except to mice perhaps and then it would be more of a deterrent.

Perhaps only pedigree cats should be sold, if I paid a load of money for a cat I would not want to let it out and risk it being run over!

Anyway I hope I made a bit of sense and have not gone on too long

[Jim Ford]

Originally Posted by feathered-friend

No doubt this thread is going to cause some debate!
<snip>
Anyway I hope I made a bit of sense and have not gone on too long

A well considered post, which pretty much shares my views.

Jim

[SheffieldLass]

Originally Posted by feathered-friend

My point is, not having a cat is a choice I made because of where we live now and the danger it would be to wildlife, but if I lived in an urban area I cannot see that a cat would make a great impact except to mice perhaps and then it would be more of a deterrent.

Sadly this is untrue. Unfortunately it can make the difference between having an area with very many birds and the same area being a bird and wildlife desert. It happened where I lived in Sheffield ... when I moved there 20 years ago it was a complete wildlife desert when there were loads of cats around. Then when the cat numbers dropped about seven years ago it gradually became recolonised, and eventually was full of birds, including passing redstart, garden warbler, blackcap, whitethroat, plus resident bullfinch, winter siskin and redpoll etc etc. Then the cat numbers began to rise again and the breeding birds had two disasterous breeding seasons and by the time I left last year the birds had virtually abandoned the area .. it was on the point of becoming a wildlife desert again. And it was the cats, nothing else, that was causing this problem.

It is a statistic that I've produced before, so apologies to those who have already seen it, but a survey was carried out in that area and there were over 1000 cats in the square kilometre and approx 600 breeding birds, so about 3 cats to every breeding pair of birds.

[thebeard]

My old house in nottingham was in an area which looked like a more wildlife friendly area than where i am now. however, we had a cat and there were other cats around, and i didn't see as much diversity there as i do here. only saw 6 or 7 species there, seen around 20 here and its really urban with barely any cats!

[feathered-friend]

Thanks sheffieldlass,

Of course I can understand your point and do not doubt the findings of the survey!

When I said "urban area" I should not have generalised and should have been more specific. I was refering to my immediate surroundings where I lived there were no parks, trees, wasteland within roaming distance of a cat, and actually probably few birds around us because of the cats.

[Jim Ford]

I've just this minute chased a cat away from below a robin's nest in a cotoneaster. It was looking up to see if could get to the nest! #!!@##!!

Jim

[natasha38]

So I own 2 cats means I don't give a stuff about wildlife!!! What rubbish - so cats are predatory animals & kill birds, so do LOADs of other animals. My dog killed a blackbird the other day, I was devastated but he has a high prey drive (we are tryiong to control this), the bird was obviously injured & sat next to the path & he lunged at it, that more than my cats have EVER killed

[Jim Ford]

Originally Posted by natasha38

So I own 2 cats means I don't give a stuff about wildlife!!!

No - you care more about keeping cats than you do about wildlife. To claim otherwise is simply hypocritical in my book!

Jim