We don't get the foraging nomadic birds like silvereyes visiting any more because of all the cats with their constant spraying, digging latrines, catfights and prowling around our yard which is one of the few that has earth and trees. Bring your cats in at night, people, and desex them early before they get into bad habits.
http://www.sciencewa.net.au/topics/environment-a-conservation/item/2936-findings-back-tougher-cat-laws
http://www.sciencewa.net.au/topics/environment-a-conservation/item/2936-findings-back-tougher-cat-laws
We've had mother cats have litters in our yard 4 times that we know of - no collars, no responses to vigorous queries as to owners... trapped them and took them to the cat haven, that's just us, one house... how many others are there across the suburbs, eventually taking a terrible toll on native birds, lizards, etc?
ReplyDeleteWhich is the corrrect thing to do up to a point. The current set of cat laws is quite draconian and completely unbalanced by comparison with the dog laws. Cats after all do not maul people or cause misery by barking noisily for hours on end.
ReplyDeletealso years ago i noticed it wasn't till they stopped spraying the nasty stuff that any bird life came back at all i didn't see a willy wag tail for years until they stopped spraying heptaclor
ReplyDeletethey used to blame cats then too although i'm sure cats did a lot of damage too.
In various areas i frequent for work there used to be an abundance native life it's all gone cats and foxes blamed but it also coincided with introduction of their weed spraying programs.
The cats could well have been feral/semi as my own cats had their litters in their boxes at home when i was a kid.
Not excusing cat owners who do the wrong thing though.
we have large numbers of birds at home but i think the crows are almost as destructive our urban wastelands are a paradise for them.
ReplyDeletethe willy wag tail landing on my plastic hawk (crow deterent) to poop on it and leave most the amusing i seen for a long time
Ha ha! Classic. Birds are very smart. Corvids are the smartest but even little birds learn very well.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is people - feeding the crows and not securing rubbish.
A cat euthanised in the early days of Arid Recovery. Its stomach contained:
24 painted dragons
3 bearded dragons
3 striped skinks
2 earless dragons
1 mouse
1 zebra finch
The animals were predominantly undigested, which shows that this was all prey caught in the last 24 hours.
The outback feral cats are breeding back to cheetah size possibly to give them a chance at goannas and small kangaroos and a defence against foxes and possibly dingos. That is an impossible meal size for a standard domestic cat.
ReplyDeleteIt's an impossible meal size for a Siberian Tiger just about! But this still doesn't mean dear old Aunty Betty should be complacent about Tibbles not harming a flea when it's outside in the dark. That New Zealand cat killed a total of 102 bats in the space of 7 days and those were only the ones that were found - and it wasn't eating them.
ReplyDeleteWe've always brought our cats in at night and had them desexed early, but it wasn't until we started using catbibs that we saw a huge resurgence in wildlife on our property.
ReplyDeleteWe've only got one cat left now, and she's getting old. When she passes away of old age, we won't be getting any more. The realisation of how much damage they do was staggering.
None of our cats liked the bibs, but we've stuck with them - they work.
I must look up what a catbib is...I've never heard of them!
ReplyDeleteOh dear, that must be a sight.
ReplyDelete