• Underwaterbob@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      They’re built to kill. Crazy good reflexes and eyesight, amazing jump height, claws that grab hold of tree branches, feathers, and skin very nicely. There are a bunch of strays where I live, and they are murdering machines when they don’t have a bowl of food plopped in front of them twice a day at their leisure.

    • InputZero@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      The only reason why cats aren’t hunting us down right now is because we’re too big to be prey. I read somewhere a long time ago that domestic cats have one of the highest predation success rate in the mammalian class. Meaning once they choose to actually try to hunt something they usually get it.

    • The_Tired_Horizon@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I’ve watched neighbours cats take out song birds in our garden several times. They’re usually too well fed to actually eat them so just “play” the bird gets injured/has a heart attack and dies from that. Something like 1 in 10 homes has a cat on average in the UK. The better fed/kept they are the better they hunt.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      There was a mockingbird that would always attack our cats. The grandma cat had a beak-shaped cut in her ear and a bald spot on her head from this bird that would attack her. I was fortunate enough to witness the occasion where she finally got revenge on the bird.

      It had been pecking at one of the grandkittens and then flew away just too low, and grandma cat did a lightning-fat swipe in the air and just kept walking along like nothing had happened, not looking at the bird. The bird kept flying and flapped its wings like 2 more times, then fell to the ground dead, completely ignored by the cat.

      It was the most badass samurai shit I’ve ever seen.

    • repungnant_canary@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Don’t know for birds but apparently they can win a fight with snake because they have better reaction time. So maybe something similar is contributing here too

    • datelmd5sum@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Patience mostly I think. At least with rodent they smell a trail and then just sit there for hours and hours until one walks near enough.

    • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      They’re kind of the perfect predators, and birds need to land sometime.

      Basically their only weak point, biologically, is their kidneys.

    • 1rre
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      7 months ago

      In places where cats are native (pretty much the whole old world/Europe, Africa & Asia) it’s mostly killing old or weak birds who can’t fly as well as the fitter, younger birds - they’ve evolved together to get better at hunting/evading each other.

      In places where small cats are not native (the new world/Australian & the Americas - especially North America compared to South though due to more convergent evolution in South America) the birds haven’t co-evolved with the cats so don’t see them until it’s too late and they’re already caught regardless of how fit or healthy they are.

      It’s a classic case of native species being adapted to deal with native species, and when the invasive species comes it just eats the native one because its skillset is different to the native predators/herbivores/plants/literally any life

  • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Keeping your cats indoors won’t solve anything. Housecats aren’t destroying the bird population, feral cats are. If you want to help, volunteer with your local vet or animal control to capture, spay/neuter, then re-release stray cats.

      • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        That study’s been going around for years in the media, but mainly because it’s sensational. If you actually read the article, I’d hardly say it’s very convincing, or very accurate. Also, this.

        Existing estimates of mortality from cat predation are speculative and not based on scientific data13,14,15,16 or, at best, are based on extrapolation of results from a single study18. In addition, no large-scale mortality estimates exist for mammals, which form a substantial component of cat diets.

      • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        “About a third of the problem” So, not the primary cause (or solution.)

        https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380

        “We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality.”

        The article also states the following regarding more popular studies in the media involving pet cats: “The magnitude of mortality they cause in mainland areas remains speculative, with large-scale estimates based on non-systematic analyses and little consideration of scientific data”

      • MissJinx@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Indoor cats are not a problem because they are indoors. Outdoor cats thar come inside sometimes are a problem indeed but most of them were not adopted they just apeared out of nowhere and you now think it’s your cat. So it was feral at some point or at least was born from one.

    • garbageman@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It will solve for your cat staying not dead, not shitting in other people’s yards, and not fucking other cats.

  • EmperorHenry
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    7 months ago

    I actually laughed at that last part.

    I don’t let my cats outside without direct supervision.

  • Xenon@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    On a serious note, the problem with wind turbines is not the total number of birds they strike but the species. Larger birds of prey seem particularly susceptible. Tough this risk can be easily mitigated by not placing the wind turbines directly in their primary habitat or migration paths.

    • subtext@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I was going to say, I doubt your pet tabby is killing any California condors at any appreciable rate.

      Amazing how easy it is to bias people with data though.

  • perishthethought@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    3.5 billion birds are killed in North America per year? I didn’t know anywhere near that number even existed.

    But then again…

    Wikipedia says there are about 7.5 million square miles in the US and Canada, so that’s over 400 birds killed per square mile, per year, on average.

    That’s amazing, no?

    • Match!!@pawb.social
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      7 months ago

      Misconception. Birdkiller Georg has 3 billion dead birds a year and is also known as New York City

      • perishthethought@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        I checked again and yeah, it’s more like 9.5 million square miles, so an average of more like 370 bird deaths per square mile, per year. But now that I know that includes chickens and turkeys, and Mexico and Greenland and the Bahamas, it’s OK.

    • pafu@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      There are more than 8 billion chickens slaughtered every year in the US alone, to give some perspective.