I don't want to make a big thing about all this interest
that cats have in birds. But I saw another complaint about cats catching songbirds recently (elsewhere). I understand that cats DO catch birds. I understand that bird-lovers don't like cats very much because of it. Well *I* love birds too. It's not like I feed them to be food for my cats. Black Oil sunflower and thistle seed is way too expensive (than the canned food the cats happily eat) for THAT to be worthwhile.
They probably catch voles, mice, and moles
100-1 compared to birds. The neighborhood hawk, on the other hand,
catches 4-6 birds per day (not usually from my feeders, of course, or I would have nonbe). I see the scatterred feathers on the ground infrequently. If we want to protect songbirds, kill hawks.
My cats stalk birds. They also stalk squirrels (but never catch them -
and I wish they could) and rabbits (and though they do catch the
occasional young rabbit the world isn't going to run out of rabbits. And my cats have a varied diet of beef, chicken, turkey, tuna, duck, and rabbit. So if you are sad they eat rabbit (or any of the other animals), consider that they are eating rabbit because people raise them just to be eaten. There are predators and prey (and that started about 500 million years ago).
There
are more songbirds thriving here after I cleared the property somewhat
than before I moved in 30 years ago. I originally had a pair of
Cardinals. Today there are a dozen pairs. I never saw a Goldfinch for
the 1st few years, now there are some dozen of them. I didn't even know
what a Purple Finch was until they started nesting around the yard
attracted to the feeders. Between the thistle seeds and the black oil
sunflower seeds and suet and peanut butter smeared on trees in Winter, I
think there are more than 10X the birds here as when the lot was
undeveloped.
When one of the cats catches a bird, it
has to be pretty dumb (other than birdicide against a window). I've observed it a couple of times. The birds
sits on a low shrub branch, one cat comes near it, the bird stares at the cat stupidly, and the cat grabs it. DUH! The
dumbest bird in the flock has been removed from their gene pool, LOL!
Sometimes
the attacks on cats as bird-killers bothers me, so I wanted to give
some personal experience. Cats don't catch the smarter birds or many of them...
Put
another way, I just saw a picture in a National Geographic magazine. A
hyena is carrying away a flamingo. The flamingo is alive (its neck and head are upright) and not
acting very distressed. It doesn't
seem to be struggling. In fact, it seems to have no idea it is about to
eaten alive by the hyena. It is just like "huh" well, carry me other
to that next pond, OK"?
Sorry, I go "off" sometimes, LOL!
