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Wandering by from THR...
Look: The animal shelter folks trapped some 72 feral cats in an area of maybe a thousand acres or less, of rural and wooded land including farmland fields. I don't know if that's a common sort of number or high or low. Still, a cat to every 14 acres doesn't strike me as unduly high. I imagine the combination of birds, mice, squirrels and rabbits in 14 acres could support one cat quite easily.
Regardless, it's a potential for any similar landform. So, how many thousand-acre equivalent areas are there in Wisconsin? Dig out your atlas and do some reasonable guesstimating.
The 1995 article claimed 100 songbirds per cat per year. That's two birds a week, and I gay-ron-dang-tee you that's entirely doable, entirely likely. That's based on my own observations of housecats and birds in town, in the country and in relative wilderness. We even have feral cats in the darned desert! FWIW, I watched a neighbor's cat in downtown Austintatious do in about three mockingbirds a week, for a couple of years.
Any way you slice it, the numbers are scary when you multiply it by the number of states with songbird nesting areas...
Around my wife's house in south Georgia, we used to commonly have robins, cardinals, brown thrashers and poor wills. Time of year varied, of course. I've seen almost none in recent years.
IMO, it's more than just habitat losses...
Art
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