[URBAN NOTE] "Cats Are City Slickers"

[rfmcdonald]

Live Science's Tia Ghose reports on a study suggesting cats are less efficient predators than some have feared.

Cats have gotten a bad rap in recent years. The furry carnivores have been implicated in wildlife killings: Researchers reported in 2013 that American cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds, and more than 20 billion small mammals, each year. Most of those killings are tied to feral cats, which don't have human owners, though kitty cams have revealed outdoor domestic cats are also partaking in the carnage, that study found.

To better understand Felis catus, Hess and his colleagues, along with hundreds of citizens in six Eastern states from Maryland to Tennessee, deployed critter cams in yards, urban parks, protected wild spaces and green corridors.

After analyzing millions of hours of footage, the team found that cats tended to stick to urban and suburban settings: They were 300 times more likely to pop up in residential yards than in parks.

In addition, cats were scarce in areas where coyotes roamed. The more coyotes that prowled an area, the fewer kitties ventured there, according to the study, which was published today (June 30) in the Journal of Mammalogy. The one exception was that coyotes were occasionally found in urban corridors that were connected to larger green spaces, said study co-author William McShea, a wildlife ecologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Virginia.

[. . .]

The new findings, however, suggest coyotes play a positive role in keeping cats at bay in wilder spaces, McShea said. Coyotes are the "big kid on the block" and are aggressive toward cats, which may cause cats to stay off coyote turf, he added.