Published: Thursday, 19th February, 2009 5:00am

Collar cams capture a cat's eye view of life

by Annabel Williams

Comments (0) | Print | Email

Well and truly collared: Robert Davey with his 11-year-old moggy, Guiness, who is taking part in the study.
Pic by: University of Reading/Stephen Shepherd

CATS are being fitted with an electronic tracking device to see how much wildlife they really kill as they prowl around Reading.

The owners of more than 200 felines have volunteered their furry friends to wear a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) tracker as part of a research project at Reading University.

The project is led by environmental biology PhD student Rebecca Dulieu who has recruited the pets across nine one-kilometre-square areas around Reading, collecting any prey they bring home to get an idea of how the animals' behaviour affects bird numbers.

Rebecca, 21, said: "In Britain, we have an estimated nine million pet cats, most of which live in urban areas.

"Given their extremely high densities it could be the case that cats are significantly affecting bird populations in these areas.

"For example, house sparrow numbers in urban areas have declined by 60% since the 1980s, most likely due to changes in urban habitats but this is also one of the species most commonly killed by cats.

"For the first time, pet cats will be fitted with data loggers attached to a harness which will log their every movement and allow us to identify actions which have distinctive signatures such as eating, drinking and hunting.

"Correlating this data with the actual prey returned will give us a good idea of predation rates in urban areas."

Preliminary research at the university suggests domestic cats could be responsible for killing up to 10,000 prey animals per square kilometre in urban areas every year, affecting blackbirds, robins, sparrows and other ground feeding birds, wood mice, bank voles and shrews the most.

Nationally, it is estimated that Britain's cats kill 92 million animals a year, 27 million of which are birds.

In Reading, cat densities range from 158 animals per square kilometre to 626 animals per square kilometre.

The next stage of the project will try to identify the proportion of prey returned relative to the total number killed.