Keeping your cats indoors won't solve anything. Housecats aren't destroying the bird population, feral cats are. If you want to help, volunteer with your local vet or animal control to capture, spay/neuter, then re-release stray cats.
Not true. Pet cats are about a third of the problem, according to a 2013 nature paper. Feral populations vary a lot by location - some places have almost no ferals but lots of pet cats.
That study's been going around for years in the media, but mainly because it's sensational. If you actually read the article, I'd hardly say it's very convincing, or very accurate. Also, this.
Existing estimates of mortality from cat predation are speculative and not based on scientific data13,14,15,16 or, at best, are based on extrapolation of results from a single study18. In addition, no large-scale mortality estimates exist for mammals, which form a substantial component of cat diets.
"We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality."
The article also states the following regarding more popular studies in the media involving pet cats:
"The magnitude of mortality they cause in mainland areas remains speculative, with large-scale estimates based on non-systematic analyses and little consideration of scientific data"
Indoor cats are not a problem because they are indoors. Outdoor cats thar come inside sometimes are a problem indeed but most of them were not adopted they just apeared out of nowhere and you now think it's your cat. So it was feral at some point or at least was born from one.
What's up with comms towers? High-voltage AM antennas are not that abundant anymore. Are birds getting cooked close to high-power transmitters? Shot to avoid interference with crucial military infrastructure? Is 5G real?
On a serious note, the problem with wind turbines is not the total number of birds they strike but the species. Larger birds of prey seem particularly susceptible. Tough this risk can be easily mitigated by not placing the wind turbines directly in their primary habitat or migration paths.
I checked again and yeah, it's more like 9.5 million square miles, so an average of more like 370 bird deaths per square mile, per year. But now that I know that includes chickens and turkeys, and Mexico and Greenland and the Bahamas, it's OK.
