New York, March 21 (ANI): A new study has found that pet cats were the No. 1 enemy of birds.
While public attention has focused on wind turbines as a menace to birds, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and Towson University in Maryland said that a far greater threat may be posed by a more familiar antagonist: the pet house cat, reports the New York Times.
According to them, predators killed nearly 80 percent of the birds, and cats were responsible for 47 percent of those deaths.
Death rates were particularly high in neighborhoods with large cat populations.
Predation was so serious in some areas that the catbirds could not replace their numbers for the next generation, said the researchers.
For the study, the research team affixed tiny radio transmitters to the birds to follow them.
It is the first scientific study to calculate what fraction of bird deaths during the vulnerable fledgling stage can be attributed to cats.
"Cats are way up there in terms of threats to birds - they are a formidable force in driving out native species," said Peter Marra, one of the authors of the study.
The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats - about half by pets and half by feral felines.
The study is published in The Journal of Ornithology. (ANI)
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