36 



harm that cats do can hardly be overestimated. The young in 

 the nests or just out most often fall a prey, but the cats caught 

 many adult barn swallows, exterminated or drove away a colony 

 of tree swallows, and caught snipe, grouse, hummingbirds, 

 meadowlarks and many unidentified small birds. Many a time 

 at 4 A.M. she has gone to the rescue of birds attacked by night- 

 prowling cats. 



Mrs. Elizabeth B. Davenport of Brattleboro, Vt., well known 

 as an accurate observer, who has taken great pains to teach cats 

 not to kill birds, writes that her experience covers many years 

 while feeding birds about her grounds, and seasons spent on farms 

 in Connecticut and in Vermont. In her grounds every small 

 bird was attacked if cats had access to feeding places, and she 

 had to surround these places with wire netting in summer and 

 to protect them with high snow walls in winter. On the farm in 

 summer cats brought in all kinds of ground-nesting or low-nesting 

 birds. One cat in particular frequently brought in three or four 

 birds a day. 



Careful observers who have watched and protected birds for 

 many years have had the best of opportunities for observing the 

 destructiveness of cats. The editor of "Bird-Lore" publishes 

 the statement from a correspondent that in one summer a neigh- 

 bor's cat killed all the warblers on the place but one, eighteen in 

 all, also two wrens, two woodpeckers and several other birds 

 which were not identified.^ Mrs. Oscar Oldburg of Chicago 

 gives a partial list of birds killed by cats on her place, with dates. 

 It contains fourteen individuals of six species and two nests full 

 of eggs. She says also that many juncos are destroyed annually.* 



INIiss Cordelia J. Stanwood of Ellsworth, Me., says that at one 

 time one of her neighbors kept seven cats. One of these in 

 particular often caught as many as three birds a day, and is be- 

 lieved to have caught more when the young birds began to leave 

 the nests. There were three cats in her own house, and her 

 nephew who watched them said that they averaged more than 

 three birds a day. She asserts that many persons in that region 

 keep from three to seven cats, and she knows of one who keeps 

 twenty. One day Mrs. Melville Smith, on whom she called, said 

 that as she sat with a friend watching a hummingbird a cat 

 caught it. The same day a cat kept at a house across the street 

 caught four, and on the previous day a cat at the next house 

 brought in two. The same day Miss Stanwood called on Mrs. 

 Edward Wyman, and at her house the piazza was strewn with 

 feathers of a black-throated green warbler. The number of cats 



> Bird-Lore, JaDuary-Febniaiy, 1909, p. 68. * Ibid., July-A\icu>t, 1910, p. 150. 



