Protect Your Birds From Cats

Everyone knows I love birds. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t. Many people don’t know I also love cats. My daughter also loves animals. I’m certain she inherited love of animals from both her mother and me. She wants to save the world actually. She’s an adult and belongs to a sea turtle rescue organization. She has, over the years, rescued five feral cats and somehow they have ended up in my country backyard. Spayed and neutered of course, and well fed and taken care of. So the question is how can a lover of both birds and cats reconcile the activities of both?

You can search the web and find organizations that promote keeping cats indoors. This is a great idea but not practical for the feral cat population that we all know is already too large to begin with. If you live in a neighborhood with neighbors close by you’ll also have to deal with those that have no issue letting their cats out to come stalk in your yard. There’s not much you can do about this either. So what do you do when you can’t really keep cats out of your yard and you want to attract birds into it?

Ideally you should place your birdhouse as high into the bird’s habitable zone as you can. What I mean by a habitable zone is that height off the ground that a bird prefers. For example a Violet-Green Swallow prefers to be 5-15 feet above the ground while the Indigo Bunting prefers 2-10 feet. If you’re trying to attract the Swallow place the house 15 feet above the ground and for the Bunting 10 feet. This puts as much distance between your birds and any marauding cats as possible.

Many people place their birdhouses on a post purchased from one of the large, sell everything under the sun, hardware stores. This is a good option in many cases because it can be made to discourage cats from climbing. Putting your birdhouse in a tree provides too many ways for cats to get to your birds. If you purchase a 4″ x 4″ post from a hardware store also purchase an 8 foot section of PVC drainage pipe 5″ in diameter and a can of expanding foam sealant. One you have the post in the ground, assume at 10 feet high, put the PVC pipe over it and into the ground about 6 inches. Seal the top of the pipe with the expanding foam and trim and paint it to match your landscape. This will prevent water from getting into the pipe and also stop the pipe from becoming a hazard to any chick falling out of the birdhouse. The pipe can also be spray pained and once in place will provide a great deterrent to cats and squirrels from attacking your birds.

If cats roam your neighborhood and yard you’re still probably going to suffer the loss of a bird or two over the course of a season. There’s not much more you can do about that. Just be prepared to accept that as a fact of life. We all love nature and we don’t seem to mind the Eagle or Osprey snatching up a fish to bring back to the nest. Yes, they have to hunt because no one is feeding them and that’s not the case with most roaming cats. However, just like the Eagle hunting is in a cat’s nature. They cannot help what they are. If you take all of the precautions you can and you still have a loss over a nesting season reconcile yourself to the fact that you have provided an environment where many other birds grew and survived. It’s probably true that many more birds were born and survived in your yard than would have in the wild and that’s something to be very happy about.

There’s a bit to consider attracting birds to your property. A Wolf Mountain birdhouse is designed just for the bird you want to attract and our store even explains the environment they prefer.