"Beautiful, clean coal."

Buht them be burd blenders!!!! 😵‍💫

Cats are expert hunters

Gotta land sometime, bitch 🐈‍⬛

There's that time of the year when birds land, make nests, lay eggs and have to hang around to feed their young. That's a very vulnerable time for them. Make sure your bird house and bird feeder are cat proof.

I once physically removed a still living bird from my cats clutches and set it free. I saw him get it. Birds are just fucking oblivious. Standing around pecking at the ground and not checking their surroundings.

I had an indoor/outdoor cat that would catch birds at night, bring them home dead , and play with them.

What a mess.

Next cat would only go out during the day and lay around. He did manage to catch two rats

Many of these graphs were made to show that windmills do not really contribute to bird death.

From the wiki for bird-window collisions:

There are several methods of preventing bird-window strikes. The use of ultraviolet (UV) signals to make windows appear visible to birds, while once one of the most common means of combatting this issue, is no longer recommended by experts. This is because while some birds can see UV light, not all can. Other solutions include window film (as long as it is placed on the exterior of the glass) and ceramic frit glass (glass with fritdots).[30] Windows can also be covered with decals spaced no more than 5 cm horizontally or 10 cm vertically to prevent collisions.[31]

I had assumed it was cheaper to do dots, but it’s actually just more broadly effective. That’s a better reason :)

Dots are cheaper than UV filters and easier to apply retroactively. Both have the same effect of creating a visible obstruction for birds to discourage strikes.

Dots and UV are different solutions to the same problem, they both make the glass visible to birds. Its one or the other usually, not both.

The cats have a curfew? Have you met cats?

They have.

Birdsafe collars reduce bird catches by 87%. (A bell will reduce bird catches by 41%).

https://www.usgs.gov/publications/how-effective-birdsbesafer-cat-collar-reducing-bird-mortality-domestic-cats

I mean, we do need to ban humans for sure

Birds that get eaten tend to have high reproductive rates, and if predator levels drop their population gets so high they start to die from hunger or disease (which spreads faster in crowded conditions). Many predators eat an incredible number of animals - a large owl may eat several small birds every day for itself, and a multiple of that if feeding nestlings. Cats aren't unique here.

Domestic cats can be a threat to specific populations already endangered by other factors, but usually those are ground animals. Cats being a threat to population levels of birds in most of the world just isn't believable to me.

Domestic cats that go out to hunt aren't controlled by natural causes, like food availability for example. But they go out at night to hunt nonetheless, and they're usually in their peak conditions because they don't have to go hungry for long periods of time.

As numbers that I am aware of,

Cats kill an estimated 50-200 million birds annually in Germany, according to NABU and Max Planck Institute estimates

With a cat population of Germany approximately 15 million, most of which are permanently indoor, the rest are keeping themselves very busy for no reason