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by nullstyle 809 days ago
My understanding is that the dirty little secret of these types of articles is that many song birds actually die because of the harshness of winter (and from what I gather, growing occurence of extreme weather events.) Unfortunately, that is much harder to study that than killing and cataloging the gut contents of some stray cats and doing some statistics.

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That said, keep your cat indoors and spread cat-proof nesting boxes for your local bird friends around your community. you don't have to pick sides :)

1 comments

do you have any evidence for this "dirty little secret"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations

> Birds and larger mammals that eat insects can be directly affected by the decline.

Yeah yeah Wikipedia is not a source or evidence but it's a good enough starting point.

Pollution, global warming, ecosystem destruction, etc is causing bug population collapse which is at the basis of the food chain, including birds.

Cats may be part of the problem, but they are not /the/ problem. Compare also with the claims that windmills cause bird deaths (https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds).

See also https://theconversation.com/dont-blame-cats-for-destroying-w...