Missing is the deaths due to coal and deforestation.
I guess this is direct deaths.
The low and high estimate for cats are so far apart they may as well just shrug.
that is cats for you, they kill when they feel like it
Yeah that’s exactly what I thought.
I’ve had several outdoor cats, and only 1 would actively hunt, and in all these years I only found a single dead bird. 3-4 outdoor cars on my block, never found anything dead. I don’t get it when people say cats are such a scrouge.
Maybe they’re so well fed now days they don’t bother to hunt? Seems people used to be meaner to strays, haven’t seen a skinny/sickly cat in ages.
I think the point that most people miss is that these studies mix together domestic and unowned/ feral cats. It is highly likely that our domestic cats who are fed well don’t hunt as much
Oh! Counting feral cats makes a huge difference. I was only looking at the issue from a pet-centric POV.
So letting my fixed/neutered pet out, no big deal. Makes way more sense now.
You should keep your pet indoors too. Lots of well-fed pet cats like to hunt small mammals and birds because it’s what they’re wired to do. Many many housecats bring their owners gifts of dead birds and mice.
I find at least 5 dead birds every year. I have blink camera videos of the local cats stalking the birds.
More than anything else, it’s inconsiderate to your neighbors who might not want your cats on their property. My wife and I take great joy in watching the local doves nest and raise chicks, and we will absolutely defend them from feral pests and outdoor “pets” alike.
Around me they mostly kill mice, chipmunks and baby squirrels.
I mean I find 5-10 dove and robin corpses on my tiny lot every summer. Cats are very clearly an issue.
“Other collision’s” kinda takes blame away from what’s happening, its glass windows. This from wiki: “a 2024 study on the survival rate of bird-building collision victims indicates that previous research was vastly underestimating the number of deaths caused by collisions, and in actuality well over 1 billion birds die from collisions in the United States every year.”
Fun fact, there’s a layer they can put in glass that makes it visible to birds but not us, but its more expensive, so it isn’t used most places!
Do you have a link to more info about the layer product? My google fu is failing me.
Not affiliated but this website is a perfect example: https://www.birdshades.com/
There’s a couple of other websites selling similar things, you can also buy UV film yourself to apply to your own windows. I first learned about it on Grand Designs!
Link to the grand designs build where they call it ornilux glass.
Awesome. Thanks for replying!
Oh god, another time I see that cat killing birds statistics.
- Cats prefer to kill rodents and are more equipped to it. And the same study Loss et al estimates cat killing rodents to be 4 times more than birds.
- Rodents (e.g. rats) eats bird eggs. Same researcher fails to calculate how much…
- All studies (well, 1 study in Australia) that compared bird population with cats in rodent areas confirm that removal of cats hastened decrease of bird population 2 times.
- Loss at all is a metastudy. Some of the data sources on cat predation and other collisions are 70-100 years old. Some are more recent, but overall data quality on bird death is local, from small sample, and estimated. My favourite was a study on 10 cats in 3 villages estimated over a whole damn country.
- The graph seems to be missing all other non-collision sources of bird population death, e.g. rodents eating birds, pesticide related deaths, electrocutions form powerlines, etc. etc.
Yes, simplified thinking here led to Mao killing off sparrow to protect crops only for those crops to be eaten by insects that otherwise would have been managed by said sparrows…
There’s no denying that outdoor cats kill birds but you’re right that those numbers are inflated. Plus, the problem with looking back 70-100 years back isn’t just methodology but it’s the fact that stray and feral cats are much better maintained in the last few decades. It’s a problem many counties actually bothered to tackle with high profile neutering campaigns and such. So, I bet the numbers are probably lower than collisions at this point.
Context also matters a lot-- cats are, like us, an invasive species. The most evidence of it being a problem are in places where there were no major predators for birds (mostly thinking of islands like New Zealand). But that’s less a matter of bird deaths so much as a matter of man made ecological changes leading to endangerment.
It’s also weird how much easier it should be to just not have clear glass skyscrapers murdering thousands of birds vs what, killing off cats? What even is the end game to that statistic, lol.
I think it’s to show that bird deaths from turbines is insignificant
Thank you! I have been puzzled about that for years.
This sounds like the type of denial one hears from. climate change deniers except with cats instead.
Just say you have outdoor cats and refuse to accept anything that says it’s bad.
I don’t have a cat. Nor a dog. I do have a book on bird watching and binoculars though.
No need to be an asshole. There is a large cultural difference between the US and EU on this issue. Expert opinion is also divided, of low quality and influenced by local opinion.
Americans tend to think in moral absolutes about everything, and from their moral absolutism have an unwavering delusional confidence that they are ‘correct’ because of their feelings. It’s why we are so backwards in so many ways.
Birds good, cats bad. Full stop. If you don’t agree you are evil and clearly support bird genocide!
No other possibility is allowed in the discussion, like understanding that systems are complex and/or that not all cats are the same, or that the studies often quoted on these issues are flawed and problematic in many ways. And that the general solution to the problem… the control of the feral cat population, is one both ‘sides’ already agree on. Because there is no ‘drama’ in that. It’s much more dramatic to scream at every cat owner they are a evil person if they allow their cat outside at any time ever.
Given I see it the same as climate denial, I see no reason not to be an asshole to either type of a anti-science tomfoolery.
People are taking this really personally, the chart isn’t even throwing shade at cats. It’s saying look how small this is compared to something basically no one cares about in the US. Domestic and the resulting feral cats are a human created invasive species issue that way worse and more destructive than we give it credit for because we love cats.
I’m tangentially involved enough in local spay/neuter programs and you can see these consequences locally wherever you live.
Like I love cats, I have 4 indoor, no outdoor animals, but people are really trying to act like feral cat predation is no big deal. It is a huge deal, we just don’t care, and if we don’t care about a billion birds getting killed by cats, and a quarter billion by windows, why the hell would we care about the 7 that windmills killed in comparison.
Wind turbines kill as many birds in the US as the feral cats in my COUNTY do.
Ironically this comment is far far more like the attitude of climate change deniers than anything else that has been said in this thread.
Yep, there we go. Projection is the final stage of denial. Congrats you did it.
People who vaccinate at the true menace! This is why I assume people are stupid. Few people are willing to critically examine their own behavior when called out on it.
I’m being called and asshole in this thread and you don’t see me denying that shit. I own it.
This is why I assume people are stupid. Few people are willing to critically examine their own behavior when called out on it.
If only you were self aware.
Look you did it again! Good job staying consistent
why would you have to examine your own behavior if you are right and everyone else is stupid and wrong?
So what’s your take on my comment here:
One desd bird doesn’t mean it only killed one. Also, the other comments that it’s feral cats is spot on.
One concern is well fed outdoor cats normalized people who have feral cats , especially the kinds they dump a bag of food every now and then and think they mean they aren’t part of the problem.
And in general, people should not allow their pets outside. We do it for cats but not other animals because people think their cats is never a nuisance; bird killer or otherwise.
All the science says don’t let your cat out. Pointing at one specific stat and ripping it apart and claiming victory is exactly how we allowed climate change to just slip away for over 60 years now.
It’s not a problem if I dump some motor oil into the ground because oil tankers leaker more! Either too contribute or too don’t and I’m going to be a dick to anyone that contributes no matter how little.
All the science says don’t let your cat out.
Not really, no.
Cat wellbeing doesn’t say that. Cat depression rates in high enriched indoor environments neither. Keeping the cat indoors is like keeping the people forced to stay in home during Covid - it has negative wellbeing consequences.
Pointing at one specific stat and ripping it apart and claiming victory is exactly how we allowed climate change to just slip away for over 60 years now.
What the heck are you talking about? What stat? There are studies that show that the cats kill mostly rodents (Lowes et al.), and that average bird prey is old or sick. The biggest problem with bird population dropping is not invasive cat species, but invasive human species.
Bird loss is a function of habitat shrinking, climat change, pesticides and pollution. Any fix must focus on that instead of a cheap scapegoat. Do you know how I can tell that? Because the birds are dropping world wide (over 66% of bird species are in decline), outside of outdoor cat heavy areas you seem to want to focus on.
Plastic straws didn’t cause the climate change.
Fun fact: windmills have a speaker on then that emits a high pitched chirp. Humans cant hear it, and birds avoid it.
They also stop or reduce turbine speed during peak migration season, and scientists have found that painting one of the blades a dark color prompts the birds to fly further away from the turbine.
They do kill a lot of birds though, and bats. An absolute fuckton of bats. My partner did turbine strike studies in college, and said that the number of bat deaths is really disheartening. Bats in my area like to find the tallest “snag” to roost in… Guess what a wind turbine looks like to them…
I was lying about the speakers
Forget the “also” then.
My somehow-now-conservative mom lives in the midwest and will rant long and hard about how windmills make the soil under them “dirty” because they “leak oil from the blades” and “all the farmers know it’s true”
I once considered this lady smart, smh
I’m a soil scientist. Want some talking points lol.
One of her friends probably listened to a talk show where two people removeded about it for 3 minutes and played some devil’s advocate. I swear they use the conservative talk shows to train to become horrible people.
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Domestic cats are not native to the US. Their presence is absolutely human caused. And lack of efforts to contain them is also the fault of humans. People should not feed the strays in their neighborhoods. People should not let their own cats outside. Etc.
It’s also Cats vs Collisions.
Hit a car? Hit a building? Hit a windmill.
The fifth floor of our office building regularly has greasy pigeon marks from some poor skyrat thinking the windows that are A. moderately reflective B. dirty AF and C. have never been open are all of a sudden clear paths to the inside.
I misread as “Cars (domestic and feral)” and was very concerned about the idea of feral cars XD
feral cars
Self driving Teslas?
Waymos probably do kill a ton of urban wildlife.
That’s fake, this is real and legal.
The car from h*rry pott*r
or Christine
Ask any groundskeeper for a glass building. You find dead birds every day.
Even the low estimate for birds killed by collisions with cars seems high to me. I’ve been driving for over 25 years and think in that time I’ve only hit birds maybe twice, certainly fewer than 5 times. Birds just don’t seem to fly at car height very often or for very long, and they typically get out of the way quickly when on the ground (George Costanza notwithstanding).
I’m assuming my experience is pretty typical, and the majority of my driving has been in environments where birds were pretty typically abundant. If we say I’ve hit 5 birds in 25 years (again, a number that seems high), maybe we can extrapolate that 20% of drivers would hit a bird in a year. With 242 million drivers in the US, that would be 48.4 million birds killed, and again, that’s using a number that seems high in my experience.
I would be curious to see the source on those estimates and how they reached their numbers.
Per driver is an incorrect assumption. It’s would need to be per mile driven.
It would then need to be broken down by vehicle type by size and mass. For example I would not be surprised if semis aren’t the majority of vehicle bird deaths.
Are windows other collisions? I think we had 3-6 birds die hitting windows just this last year. Put up some window stickers hoping for a better result, but I have to think windows kill more than all others combined.
Trump’s giant skyscrapers covered in windows probably kill way more birds than windmills.
Should we break all Trump’s windows to save the birds. Inquiring minds want to know!
Use the buildings to kill all the pigeons and supply Trump Chicken outlets.
Wait, is hunting no longer considered a “human-caused death”? Or were windmills really a bigger killer?
But yea, outdoor domestic cats are fucking menace to birds and plenty of other small animals.
I hope it’s not included in 'Other collisions '.
“This bird died from colliding with a bullet”
Like these people even care about wildlife. They would rather pump oil and leak in to the ocean if it meant they get to still drive gas guzzling cars polluting the Earth
679,089 seems oddly specific for an estimate
So we shouldn’t use cat-butter engines to generate electricity?
