[wanderingbit]

I think they're bringing it up because cats are indeed the #1 killer of birds, and so for people who care about maintaining bird populations (presumably people who read this article) it would be better to focus on solutions that decrease the damage cats to do birds, rather than the damage wind turbines + oil-and-gas plants do to birds.

Of course, if you care about birds you're going to try to solve it across multiple fronts. But cat damage should be the first thing bird-lovers try to mitigate.

[wingworks]

Also dogs aren't great for bird populations. Especially here in NZ where we have some flightless birds. I would even argue that dogs are a bigger issue here. At least around where I live, a large majority of people own at least 1 dog and often go walking with them in native reserves, often ignoring on-lead or no dog rules.

[belorn]

Are the bird species that cat kills the same ones that "wind turbines + oil-and-gas plants" kill?

[Grimburger]

Cat kills are basically indiscriminate, from anecdotal evidence I'd say that turbine strikes are probably not and certain species are more likely to get hit. In Australia at least there's species who routinely get hit by cars and others which rarely do.

That said, the enormous delta in raw numbers makes this line of argument quite spurious. Wind turbine bird strikes are magnitudes smaller than deaths from domestic cats.

> Collectively, roaming pet cats kill 546 million animals per year in Australia

https://invasives.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Pet-cat-...

> 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.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-04/cats-killing-one-mill...

> a report on bird and avifauna mortality commissioned by AGL Energy for its Macarthur Wind Farm found that 10.19 birds were killed by each turbine in a 12 month period. This equates to over 1 400 birds killed at the Macarthur Wind Farm alone and over 21 000 if extrapolated across the country.

This is likely underestimated due to scavenging but still magnitudes of difference.

https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/committees/sen...