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| Cat eyeing a bird, Phoenix, Arizona. |
The following is from the abstract of a recent study in Nature Communications, titled "The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States" by Loss, Will, and Marra:
Here we conduct a systematic review and quantitatively estimate mortality caused by cats in the United States. We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals. Scientifically sound conservation and policy intervention is needed to reduce this impact.
Many of the news reports have emphasized only the total counts of birds killed. I was curious to find out which particular birds are affected and how much. I found an interesting table in the supplement to their paper, listing the birds affected in order of proportion of mortality estimated to be caused by cat predation. It addresses the very question I had. The following is a piece of it:
