56 



broken for her repast, but this habit is exceptional. Mrs. Mar- 

 garet Morse Nice tells of cats in Oklahoma becoming a great 

 nuisance by breaking and eating hens' eggs. 



Extermination of Islant) Birds by Cats. 



An isolated island is a little world by itself, and any fertile, 

 well-watered one where birds can be protected from their natural 

 enemies is likely to become a bird paradise. Gardiner's Island, 

 N. Y., has been noted for many years for the numbers of birds 

 that breed there, and for their tameness, although gunning is 

 allowed upon the island during the shooting season. There are 

 no cats there. ^ Wherever cats have been introduced and al- 

 lowed to multiply unchecked upon an island, they have deci- 

 mated, driven out or exterminated the birds. 



Rothschild, in his great work, "Extinct Birds," names the cat 

 first after man among the only important exterminative agents, 

 and gives instances of the extermination of birds on sea islands. 

 Henry Travis, the New Zealand ornithologist, says that many 

 of the islands in that part of the world formerly teeming with 

 bird life are now denuded because of the introduction of the cat. 

 On the Chatham Islands, five hundred miles east of New Zealand, 

 a land rail, Cabalus dieffenbachi, and a long-tailed wren-like bird, 

 Bowlderia rufescens, are now believed to be extinct. Another 

 land rail, Cabalus modestes, on the Island of IMangare, formerly 

 found also on Warekauri, has become extinct since the invasion 

 of cats.^ On Aldabra Island, off the east coast of Africa, all 

 the numerous flightless birds except one have disappeared since 

 the cat came, and that one exists now in numbers only on some 

 smaller islands of the group that the cat has not reached.' 

 On Glorioso Island numbers of cats range the jungle, and birds 

 have been decimated even more than on Aldabra. 



A few cats often are enough to destroy the birds on a small 

 island. The cats get the birds in the nesting season when in- 

 cubating eggs or brooding young, and thus prevent breeding. 

 A cat belonging to Peter Lyall, the lighthouse keeper on Stevens 

 Island (a wooded island hardly a square mile in extent in Cook's 

 Strait), exterminated a little wren, Traversa lyalli. Only twelve 

 specimens are now in existence, and all these were brought in by 

 this cat, an excellent hunter, which roamed over the entire island. 

 How many more she ate or left dead in the woods will never be 



■ Chapman, Frank M.: Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist, I90S, p. 39. 

 * See Rothschild, Walter: Extinct Birds, 1907, pp. 21, 128; also Forbes, Ibis, 6th aeries, V, 1S93, 

 p. 523. 

 » Abbott, W. L.: Proceedinga of the National Museum, Vol. XVI, 1893, pp. 762, 764. 



