For whom the bell tolls: cats kill more than a million Australian birds every day

Date: 17, Oct, 2017
Author(s):   John Woinarski, Brett Murphy, Leigh-Ann Woolley, Sarah Legge, Stephen Garnett, Tim Doherty
Publisher: The Conversation

Cats kill more than a million birds every day across Australia, according to our new estimate – the first robust attempt to quantify the problem on a nationwide scale. By combining data on the cat population, hunting rates and spatial distribution, we calculate that they kill 377 million birds a year. Rates are highest in Australia’s dry interior, suggesting that feral cats pose a serious and largely unseen threat to native bird species.