Browsing the archives for the Cats and Birds category
Song Sparrow, Whitby, Ontario. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Mdf.
New study attempts to demonstrate how the presence of predators alone can reduce songbird reproduction by bombarding birds with round-the-clock audio recordings of predator noises. One co-author of the study goes further, attempting to implicate cats.
The purpose of scientific inquiry (am I wrong about this?) [...]
For more than 20 years now, Gill’s classic text has been required reading for ornithology students. While the book’s attention to conservation issues has expanded over its three editions, its treatment of the impact of cats on bird populations reflects an unsettling shift away from science.
The hoards of students descending upon college campuses this fall [...]
Thirty-three: that’s how many species of birds have been driven to extinction by feral cats. At least.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve stumbled across references to this figure over the past couple years. Not once, however, have I seen more than one species (usually the Stephens Island Wren, its story having been twisted [...]
Northern mockingbird. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Ken Thomas.
“I thought the cats probably really hammered them when they were fledglings,” said former University of Florida doctoral student Christine Stracey in a press release about her study of Northern mockingbirds, “but when they were in the nests, I didn’t really expect the cats to [...]
By now, many—perhaps most—readers have already seen the segment of Monday night’s episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in which correspondent Aasif Mandvi satirized the cat-bird debate (described all too accurately, I’m afraid, by Mandvi as an “intractable war”).
Interviewed for the piece were American Bird Conservancy president George Fenwick and Alley Cat Allies [...]
Photo from an online application form Nico Dauphine was (until Tuesday) using to hire field assistants, whose duties include “assist[ing] citizen participants in deploying miniature collar-mounted cameras on their free-roaming pet domestic cats.”
Tuesday, while animal welfare organizations across the country were issuing statements condemning the alleged cruelty and urging justice in the case, Nico Dauphine’s [...]
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
—Sir Walter Scott
Wind turbine near Walnut, Iowa. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Bill Whittaker.
Two stories from New York Times writer Elisabeth Rosenthal caught my eye this past Monday. The first, “Tweety Was Right: Cats Are a Bird’s No. 1 Enemy”—the latest recounting of [...]
A Gray Catbird in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons and John Benson.
Once again, the Smithsonian has apparently put marketing (and perhaps politics, too) ahead of science, reviving a story first posted on the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center’s (SMBC) Website in October of last year (which has since been removed).
“Alarming number of fledgling, [...]
Using Google to translate the page’s contents, it seems this bird—despite “mock[ing] the cat and with loud cries of diving at him from the branches of acacia”—was yet another one that got away.
In the third edition of his massive book Ornithology—“the classic text for the undergraduate ornithology course,” according to the description on Amazon.com—Frank Gill [...]
For years now, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) has been promoting erroneous and misleading information in their tireless effort to vilify free-roaming cats. No organization has been more effective at working the anti-TNR pseudoscience into a message neatly packaged for the mainstream media, and eventual consumption by the general public. Speaking to the Wall Street [...]
Over the weekend, a comment (criticizing, once again, the recently released University of Nebraska-Lincoln “report”) I posted on Audubon magazine’s blog, The Perch, drew fire from Travis Longcore.
Longcore, of course, is the lead author of the widely circulated paper, “Critical Assessment of Claims Regarding Management of Feral Cats by Trap-Neuter-Return” and Science Director for [...]
As I dig deeper into “Feral Cats and Their Management,” I continue to undercover discrepancies between the story Hildreth, Vantassel, and Hygnstrom are telling and what’s actually in the literature.
As I pointed out in my first post on the topic, Olof Liberg did not differentiate between native and non-native prey, as Hildreth, Vantassel, and Hygnstrom [...]
The second in the Framed series is from the recently released book, The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation.
The book’s authors actually have very little to say about TNR, assuming, I suppose, that the accompanying photos say it all. The caption for this one reads (somewhat incongruously, if you ask me): “Managed feral cat [...]
That the ancient Egyptians worshiped cats as gods is, today, common knowledge. Just as their regal little bodies were preserved through mummification, their likenesses were preserved in tomb paintings.
But the cat’s image has not always been portrayed with such reverence. “To the medieval mind,” writes naturalist and biologist Roger Tabor, “there was a sinister side [...]
Perhaps it’s an act of desperation, this “kitchen sink” approach favored by some free-roaming cat/TNR opponents. Throw everything—including the kitchen sink—into the anti-cat argument, and perhaps something will stick. Their impact on wildlife and the environment, for instance, or their threat to public safety—it seems there’s something for everybody. (Surely it’s only a matter of [...]
A Gray Catbird in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons and John Benson.
According to its website, the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center is a “national and international leader in the biology and conservation of migratory birds.” When it comes to cats and their potential impact on birds, however, the SMBC apparently has a lot to [...]
Another study demonstrates that the majority of pet cats spend their time indoors.
In my previous post on the subject, I somehow overlooked Linda Lord’s paper, “Attitudes toward and perceptions of free-roaming cats among individuals living in Ohio.” [1] In it, Lord, Assistant Professor in Ohio State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, presents the results of [...]
The timing was uncanny. Four days after my post “Inside Job,” Washington Post columnist Adrian Higgins reported incorrectly that two-thirds of pet cats are allowed outdoors. Higgins doesn’t mention where he got that figure, but considering the sources he used for the piece—including the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), The Wildlife Society, and Dauphiné and Cooper’s [...]
Results from the American Pet Products Association’s 2009–2010 National Pet Owners Survey suggest that cats in this country are spending more time indoors than ever before. Although the proportion of owners keeping their cats inside at night has remained relatively steady since 1998 (at approximately 66%), their has been a 14% increase in daytime confinement [...]
