Hi Tweets,

Irene Wanner writes:

>Omigod, NOT AGAIN! May we return to birds?

And whales and spiders and steel mills and squirrels and grassland habitats
and mushrooms and does-anybody-here-know-Kelly? and bait fish and land use
and political initiatives and El Nino and who knows what-all else ad
infinitum that's turned up without similar comment in the last couple-three
months.

The issue of cats killing birds is an important urban conservation issue as
well as being deeply-felt by people, upset, saddened, enraged by--or
resigned to--many cat-owners' irresponsibility or outright tacky
callousness. Until either many cat-owners assume responsibility for their
pets' slaughter of birds or, failing that, birders organise to force that
responsibility at the political and enforcement level, the issue will
continue to arise, and counterstrategies only partially successful. Without
action, the issue will not go away, regardless if all the anti-'Dreaded Cat
Thread' postings were piled up sixteen feet deep along the entire length of
the Great Wall of China. Resign yourselves to it.

As to the question of why cats seem to take mostly native rather than
introduced species, a possible answer is that most of our introduced species
are from ecologies in which there is a small feline predator, and they have
developed an extra edge to their caution that helps counteract the feline's
hunting tactics. There isn't a North American counterpart to the European
wildcat, or the African Serval, or the many Asian and African wildcat
species, so there's no suite of appropriate counterstrategies in their
instinctual libraries. Many of forest species, of which American Robin was
one one originally, show a terrible naivete (in a behavioral sense) when the
young spend part of their pre-fledging period after they grow too large for
the nest on or near the ground in the vicinity of the nest. Normally, they'd
have only to worry about accipitrine hawks, owls, or occasionally dodging a
chance-casting mustelid such as a weasel or marten. But when humans unleash
huge--and increasing--numbers of a lethally-efficient small ground predator
against them and the situation becomes a savage little massacre played out
every day everywhere there are people who allow their cats to roam: the
native, behaviorally-naive birds simply haven't a chance, any more than in
the human sphere, peaceful civilians can resist and survive soldiers or
insurgents with machine guns.

And the only useful solution? Keep cats indoors and dogs on leashes.

And not just birds. A lot of people spend a lot of time and sometimes money
trying to rid their gardens of pests such as those huge slugs that
occasionally make walking barefoot in Cascadia so interesting. Time was,
garter snakes, once much more plentiful before it became fashionable to have
two cats to every livingroom and two dogs for every walk in the park, kept
slug numbers down. Cats and dogs between them, but mostly cats, killed off
the garter snakes, really the only control on slugs, and the result was an
enormous increase in their presence, with a corresponding increase in
pesticide use all over Cascadia.

Well done. Apart from the civics of it, all told it's been very neighborly
of you.

Michael Price The Sleep of Reason Gives Birth to Monsters
Vancouver BC Canada -Goya
mprice at mindlink.net