Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Like Songbirds Don't Have Enough To Worry About

Habitat destruction. Pesticides. Cell phone towers. Your cat. Now scientists have discovered that a large bat, the giant noctule, preys on migrating songbirds in Europe. It is tough to be a bird.

6 comments:

hipparchia said...

i feel for ya. as an ornithologist, birds are practically your kids. but ...

stanley temple is a doofus and he's the one who has really set off this "sylvester is killing all the widdle tweety birds!" witch hunt. he [and a colleague?] did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, ostensibly for a research proposal, and came up with cat-caused bird genocide. it got published in some second-rate [fourth-rate?] journals and has been used as the starting point for theses and dissertations and justifications for cat hunting, all of which have been questionable [that i've taken the time to read so far].

hipparchia said...

ps. i'll take some time to look at lepczyk more closely before condemning him out of hand.

Keifus said...

Well, if the kitties have to be herded first, they'll probably be just fine.


K

Archaeopteryx said...

I love the kitties, too, but they just don't belong outside. A billion years of evolution have turned them into relentless killing machines--cute, loving killing machines, but killing machines nonetheless.

Keifus said...

goddamnit, it's what I hate about lists.

Mental image for you:

here

Anonymous said...

please keep writing the blog. we need someone hitting the huck. zonker