Things you can do to help birds right now: Keep your cat indoors

People around Connecticut and elsewhere have taken in their bird feeders to try to slow the spread of the unidentified condition that is killing birds. But you no doubt still want to help birds.

So we are revising and republished a handful of action items you can do now to help.

Of course these are effective things to do no matter what! Visit our blog, Natural Selections, to read the others.

August 5, 2021 — Don’t let the cat out of the house. Outdoor cats kill an estimated 1.3 – 4 billion birds in North America every year (they also kill 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually).

It’s a huge, emotionally-charged problem. Many people think cats should be allowed to run free. But dogs are generally not allowed to do that so why should cats be allowed?

And as many as half the cats in North America are un-owned.

But if you own a cat, keep it indoors and, if you acquire a new cat, train it as an indoor pet.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, three scientists including Peter Marra Ph.D. wrote: “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.”

“Anthropogenic mortality” = death caused by humans.