about 56,000 owned cats in the act 25% of cats already contained 50% contained only at night 42,000...
TRANSCRIPT
• About 56,000 owned cats in the ACT
• 25% of cats already contained
• 50% contained only at night
• 42,000 roaming house cats
• May be 25,000 stray cats
• Cats can roam 900m in a night (mean around 200m - NZ recommends 500m buffer)
•4555 homes <900m from Red Hill
• 850 household cats can roam on Red Hill each day or night
P Predation Hotspots• Grassland earless dragon• Striped legless lizard • Pink tailed worm lizard• Threatened & declining
woodland birds• Superb parrot• Perunga grasshopper• Waterbirds • Small ground mammals
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Priorities for cat curfew cat cur
• Apply urban buffer of 500 to 1000m to hotspots
• Of 114 suburbs, 57 (50%) within 500m of important known habitat
• A further 31 suburbs (27%) within 1000m
• Only 26 beyond distance a cat might travel to hunt
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• Barratt in early 1990s collected prey remains from presentations by 450 cats to owners
• Average catch of 10.2 prey items a cat per year
• 67 different species caught
• House mouse 56% and rat 8% of items killed
• 18 % of prey native birds 7% native reptiles
• 10,000 crimson rosellas + 20,000 silvereyes estimated to be caught by domestic Canberra cats
• Kunihira from 1993 -1995 collected 400 scats from stray cats at Parliament House and the ANU.
• Opportunistic feeders, food items included insects (gryllids, mantids, moths, grasshoppers, beetles, cicadas, dragonflies, flies, cockroaches and butterflies), mice and rats, ringtail possums, brushtail possums and food scraps.
• Insects most frequent food item, followed by mammals of which possum most important. Birds more important than scraps.
Scared to Death• Predators can have sub-lethal
affects through changing prey behaviour affecting birth and death rates.
• English study found that even a small decline in song bird fecundity, resulting from changed behaviour from cat presence, can lead to local extinctions
• 167 studies highlight fear impacts much worse than kills