What are the Greatest Threats to Birds Today?

 what are the Greatest Threats to Birds Today?

If you guessed building or vehicles, or wind turbines, or pesticides or power lines or hunting you would be wrong!!

Cats are responsible for killing an astounding 196 million birds each and every single year in Canada - more  than power lines, houses, pesticides, vehicles, hunting, and buildings combined!

Domestic cats kill over 200, 000 birds every single day- a little over 8,000 birds every single hour of the day!!

Here are the annual stats from Nature Canada

  1. Feral cats – 116 million 

  2. Domestic cats – 80 million 

  3. Power Lines – 25.6 million

  4. Houses – 22.4 million

  5. Vehicles – 13.8 million

  6. Hunting – 4.7 million 

  7. Agricultural Pesticides – 2.7 million

  8. Low, mid rise, tall buildings – 2.5  million  


Birdsbesafe Free range cats including pet cats cause unimaginable harm to our fragile eco-system by competing with native predators for food, carrying diseases to other species, causing stress in birds and other prey animals, and mating with native wildcats.

A birdwatcher named Nancy Brennan started making colourful collars for cats to prevent them from killing birds which she sold on her Birdsbesafe.com                                                                                                                                                                                             A bird biologist named Susan Wilson designed an experiment to determine the effectiveness of the cat collars.                             

      Willson enlisted a group of cat owners near her home in New York.                                                                                                                                                                                    She divided the cats into two groups, one that wore Birdsbesafe collars and one that didn’t.                                                                                 

    Every two weeks, the Birdsbesafe group and the control group switched places.                                                                                                              Over the course of that fall, the cats brought home 3.4 times fewer birds while wearing Birdsbesafe collars.                                                                  

  The following spring, the collar covers made an even bigger difference—the cats killed 19 times more birds birds while in the control group than while wearing Birdsbesafe collars.                                                                                                                                                                                Wilson's study was published earlier this year in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation.                                                                                               

   A few weeks after it came out, Australian researchers published a similar study in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour.                                                    

This second paper found that Birdsbesafe wasn’t just effective for birds—compared to control animals, cats wearing the collar killed 47 percent fewer animals with good colour vision, a group that also includes reptiles.

Why do the Colourful Birdseed Collars Work? Cats normally rely on being stealthy while hunting.                                                                                      

  Their stalking behaviour lets them get close to their prey, unseen before the moment of attack. Birdsbesafe's bright colours makes cats easily seen by songbirds. Seeing the cats with Birdbesafe collars stalking, birds quickly fly to safety. Birds have an extra cone in their eyes which enables them to see colours really well even at dusk and dawn. 

If you have a cat that you allow to roam outside consider buying a birdbesafecollar. Cats are an example of an introduction of an invasive species wreaking havoc on an ecosystem. 

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