Down Home: Hear Dalton Roberts talk about being influenced by a former sheriff.
Our own lack of mindfulness can cause our birds to be killed by cats. Just this morning I found a pile of feathers in my feeding area and I realized I had set a rain barrel too close to my feeders and I feel sure a black cat that has been stalking my birds is the culprit.
In designing your bird-feeding area, make sure there are no places where cats can hide. I put that rain barrel no more than two feet closer to my birds than it had been. That’s all it took for the cat to make its move and pin down a dove.
I am disappointed that cat owners, who love their pets so much, don’t realize that we love our birds in the same way. When you turn a cat loose to roam an area, you jeopardize every bird-feeding station in the neighborhood.
A friend who hates cats for all these reasons traps or kills them. When I am tempted to follow his example, I remember how I cried when a neighbor poisoned my dog back when I was a small boy. We can come to love our pets as much as we love family and friends. Cats make marvelous pets. I just wish all cat owners were as aware of our love for our birds as they are of their love for their cats.
When you check your feeding area for cat “hidey holes,” be aware that they can hide in small places. I once quit using a ground watering pan when I observed a cat crouched under it. It was just high enough to conceal a medium-size cat.
Put your feeders as high as you can reach to fill them. Cats can jump high but it is not easy for them to get a bird by leaping upward. Bird flight instincts are very quick so you will seldom lose a bird but I once saw a cat jump five feet and swat a bird on a feeder. The cat belonged to a new neighbor and he asked me, “Does my cat bother your birds?” I said, “Yes, he jumped five feet and swatted one.” He said, “Aw, he’s too lazy to do that.” I said, “Well, you asked and I am telling you I saw it with my own two eyes.”
Cat owners just can’t fully realize how this purring, lovable creature can go to such lengths to catch and kill a bird. It was built into their very chromosomes back in the time that birds were a important part of a cat’s diet.
A sweet innocent lady once told me, “I feed my cat real well and nothing that is fed that well would kill and eat a bird.” Wrong. It might not always eat it, but it will definitely kill it.
Famed Chattanooga naturalist Robert Sparks Walker once told my mother that free-roaming cats have been observed to kill seven birds a day.
Sometimes the birds are tortured for a long time before they are killed. A former neighbor timed a cat torturing a cardinal for almost thirty minutes before finishing it off. I saw one drag a chipmunk up under the house and at least a half hour later, drag it back out, still alive but badly mauled and chewed.
Mindfulness in designing your feeding area can save many of your birds from being tortured and killed.
E-mail Dalton Roberts at DownhomeP@aol.com.