Winter Moths, Amazing Evolutionary Selection

How to Protect Ground Nesting Birds from Outdoor Cats

First, the good news for cat owners: Cats don’t kill healthy adult birds. When a cat does catch an adult bird, chances are that the bird didn’t have long to live anyway.Most cats quickly lose interest in prey that fly away. About fifteen to twenty percent of cats continue to chase things that move up into the air. This minority of cats usually aren’t very good at hunting earthbound prey. The preference is thought to be genetic; it seems to be associated  with physical traits such as having a complete, but relatively short, tail.You can identify “vertical hunters” when kittens are two or three months old. Hold one end of a string in your hand and trail the other end along the floor. Normal kittens will chase the end of the string on the floor. Vertical-hunting kittens will try to grab the part of the string that’s in your hand. Although vertical-hunting cats chase birds, few of them ever catch one. They are more likely to catch the insects that most annoy humans: large beetles, moths, flies, crickets, grasshoppers, and roaches. Nevertheless, if you try to attract songbirds to feeders, you may want to avoid living with a vertical-hunting cat. Luring birds into the cat’s territory encourages the cat to spend more time trying to catch birds, and increases the probability that it may eventually catch one.The bad news is that normal cats are likely to attack certain kinds of birds at certain times of year. While most cats ignore birds who nest high in trees, few cats can resist a bird’s nest on the ground. If you don’t want your cat to harm pretty little songbirds, it’s important to recognize bird species that normally nest on the ground. When you find one of these birds near your home in its nesting season, you will probably want to protect the nest.Domestic adult birds who are close to the same size as the cat, such as geese and chickens, have a natural talent for teaching cats to ignore ground-nesting birds. Cats who have grown up around domestic fowl will be conditioned to run away from live adult birds.