Pets

Cats Are No. 1 Threat to Birds

Kill as many as 500 million each year.

Maybe it’s time to start keeping your kitty indoors: Cats are the number one threat to birds, new research shows. A study of the mortality of baby gray catbirds in the Washington suburbs found that 80 percent of the birds were killed by predators—and the predator was a cat 47 percent of the time. The American Bird Conservancy says cats kill 500 million birds each year, as opposed to the 440,000 birds killed each year by wind turbines. “The idea of a man-made machine chopping a bird in half creates a visceral reaction,” said one Bird Conservancy official. “while the idea of a predator with its prey in its mouth—well we’ve seen that on the Nature Channel. People’s reaction is that it is normal for cats to kill birds.”