There has been a sharp decline in the number of songbirds in most metropolitan areas in America over the last few centuries. It has been called an ecological disaster of some order, since songbirds perform a helpful service: eating insects. Some of the songbirds have even become endangered.
In the same vein, the number of field mice are falling by about sixty million a year, which doesn't really effect the rodent's conservation status.
The culprit? Sleeping in our laps, sunning themselves in the washout of sunlight as it slowly flows across the carpet, licking themselves for hours daily: the common house-cat.
There are nearly 100 million house cats in the US, nearly half are feral, and of those that have homes, almost sixty percent are allowed outside for some amount of time each day. It is these sleek killing machines that are doing such damage to our aviary population.
It may seem laughable to consider a meow-machine that can be distracted by a shiny light on the ground or a string as being a top flight predator, but the design of the house cat is simply a miniature of their larger cousins in the wilds, making them quite the killing impresario. They even have the temperament as well, as fitting a house-cat with a camera collar yielded some amazing footage in a recent study: within minutes of being out the door, the cat is stalking, and then killing and eating, a tiny mouse.
The reason they were domesticated at all was for their rodent crowd control powers.
And hey, the songbird numbers don't lie.
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