peachfront

@kat_angstrom

yeah not all men, not all cats – at the end of the day, i have to post about MY experiences & my experiences are my experiences even if they don’t conform to the common fantasy (in MY experience) that education is enough to create change

it just doesn’t

IF your community IS responsive to education, that’s great but also then you don’t need a post on “what can we do about people who won’t keep their cats indoors” because you’ve found your solution

unfortunately at the rate of bird loss overall, your solution has failed in many or most areas – education doesn’t work because people make decisions about how they treat their cats based on emotion not education

that’s inarguable & anyway i don’t want to argue so i won’t be posting further on this topic

@kat_angstrom @atro_city

we’ve had decades of education & awareness, a large percentage of cat owners do not GAF or are in denial that THEIR cats are part of the problem

spay & releasing feral cats into the wild is still legal most places

animal control still turns a blind eye to roaming cats

while we’re relying on the basic goodness of cat owners, the reality is the bird population has dropped 70% to 80% because the house cat is an introduced predator with an instinctive urge to hunt, in North America new fledglings are often on the ground in the first few days of learning how to fly >they did not evolve in the presence of this predator= cat preferentially takes out young birds

a species not permitted to raise young & reproduce dies out & that’s what we’re seeing on a large scale

if anyone STILL doesn’t know this, they are either very young or fall firmly in the category of the uneducable

more trying to educate the uneducable is a waste of time birds don’t have

@KevinFRK

heh, merlin can’t always be wrong but “think horses not zebras” can lead birders to miss a lot of rarities and strays

i think my next step absent the input of a more experienced local birder to review the photo would be to pull up the local ebird records for the patch where you saw it

if everybody else, including the people who regularly visit the patch are reporting Meadow Pipit, & especially if Tree Pipit has never been seen on that patch, you can be pretty confident

good luck! the field markings on these birds are REALLY tough for me

@KevinFRK

oh boy, could be, but that’s a tough call

how did you eliminate Tree Pipit? (i’m asking not telling, the pipits are a tough category for me when there are multiple possibilities in range so i could maybe learn something…)