One MDOspreyer wrote: ?I?m not a supporter of irresponsible pet owners, but I am curious......predation is a natural phenomenon. Why cats? If you continue feeding, hawks will soon include you on their routes. Will you be upset when they take your birds??

Why cats? Follow this link to get an answer:

http://www.abcbirds.org/cats/predation.pdf

Though if you look further on the web, you will find sites dedicated to refuting studies of cat predation. (Try plugging ?cat predation? into Google.) I don?t agree with those sites. 

Predation is, as you point out, a natural phenomenon. But a free roaming pet cat is not a natural predator. Foxes in my neighborhood don?t have a human owner who will feed them and groom them and take them to the vet when they get sick. And the number of free roaming pet cats are certainly not a natural predator population. I see hawks in my neighborhood rather infrequently, maybe two to four times a week, foxes only a few times a year. I see cats every day, and often several times a day. In the fifteen years I have lived in my house, I?ve seen two hawks take birds, a Sharpy taking a House Sparrow and a Cooper?s Hawk taking a Mourning Dove. I watched them both devour their prey, and was fascinated. I wasn?t upset. To the contrary, I felt privileged to witness the predation. I do get upset, though, when I regularly and frequently find wildlife that?s obviously been taken by cats and left to rot. Numerous House Sparrows, Robins, Cardinals, Mourning Doves, mice, moles, shrews, the very occasional snake, etc. etc. etc. 

I hope this addresses your concerns. Thanks for asking!

Tom Stock
Silver Spring, Montgomery County