Australia's 2010 mouse plague.
Posted on 02/01/2013 10:45:32 AM PST by Fawn
Did you see it? It was all over the Internet the last couple of days. Sound the alarm, alert the news media. Reportedly, cats are stone-cold killers to the tune of possibly 19 billion animals a year!
USA Today, the New York Times, NPR and just about everybody else have been reporting on a “study,” released in the journal Nature Communications, that claims startling new estimates for the number of prey captured each year by free-roaming and feral cats.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.bestfriends.org ...
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I heard the story and the first thing that popped into my feeble mind was....
Who followed all those “mad cats” to determine the number of birds killed.
I also thought of Alfred Hitchcock’s the Birds movie and thought “thank God for the cats”...other wise we’d be over run by birds....
Australia's 2010 mouse plague.
A few years ago some group said that skyscrapers cause 1 billion bird deaths a year in the US.
This made me think, “how come I’m not wading ankle deep through dead birds each morning when I walk the length of 42nd street to my NYC office?”
Back of the envelope guesstimates.
50,000 US skyscrapers.
That means each skyscraper kills 20,000 birds per year.
2,500 NYC skyscrapers.
That means NYC skyscrapers kill 50,000,000 birds per year.
Per day that is 136,986 dead birds in NYC.
Which begs the question, where are all these dead birds?
When I worked at a place in NY State, they had a glass walls from the parking lot to the building. A lot of birds flew right into them. The Maintenance guy would go out and smash the ones with a shovel.... that were still alive but had broken necks. Awful. This happened alot.
;]
What about those damned windmills that slash billions of birds every year?
I never witnessed that..have you?
Don’t confuse facts with emotion.
I never do. Only the Anti-cat, bird brained people do that....
Bird brained? Premptive name calling?
But, But, But,.... Birds are so much sweeter than those nasty killer cats. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate cats, just allergic to them.
Haters gotta hate I guess. :)
Exactly! I’ve had multiple cats all of my life (I’m 60+). When it was safer, my cats were inside/outside cats. In all those years and with all those multiples of cats, I have only had one cat who was capable of catching birds.
Unless a bird is on the ground, they are very difficult for a cat to catch. A bird on the ground, that is so inattentive as to be caught by a cat is probably best out of the gene pool.
These days the cats all stay indoors, lined up at the breakfast window watching the bird feeders.
When my niece was studying biology in college one of her assignments was to go and collect dead birds beneath windmills. My sister was surprised at the number and variety that were gathered in her freezer.
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