As if we need another reason to switch to GNU/Linux

Cat is a standard util you bastard!

Linux isn't even on the list but neither is mac. Makes you think

because killing birds isn't a task of the kernel, it's the task of a userspace utility part of the coreutils
- /usr/bin/stone
- The one for appending files to the standard output, or the one for murdering unresponsive children?
UNIX-like superiority
Mac is also Unix based. Doesn't kill many birds.

This reminds me of the anti-wind-energy arguments about the turbines killing many birds...

Fuckn Microsoft, man!

Bill gates putting microchips in the water to turn the birds suicidal

how in the world are cats so good at killing something that can literally fly

They're built to kill. Crazy good reflexes and eyesight, amazing jump height, claws that grab hold of tree branches, feathers, and skin very nicely. There are a bunch of strays where I live, and they are murdering machines when they don't have a bowl of food plopped in front of them twice a day at their leisure.
- Also whenthry do. Cats like to play
The only reason why cats aren't hunting us down right now is because we're too big to be prey. I read somewhere a long time ago that domestic cats have one of the highest predation success rate in the mammalian class. Meaning once they choose to actually try to hunt something they usually get it.
- Yeah theres like two species that are better, and they're both also cats.
- To be fair they are good at choosing WHO to hunt
- They'd be a lion, if they could, essentially
The reflexes of cats are insane and faster then a snake can bite. This video is a little demonstration for that

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=prECuyfQU-o
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://m.piped.video/watch?v=prECuyfQU-o
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
And simultaneously can't find the piece of ham I dropped in front of their nose.
- they cant see things that close to them, a certain distance away they will be able to see it
I've watched neighbours cats take out song birds in our garden several times. They're usually too well fed to actually eat them so just "play" the bird gets injured/has a heart attack and dies from that. Something like 1 in 10 homes has a cat on average in the UK. The better fed/kept they are the better they hunt.
There was a mockingbird that would always attack our cats. The grandma cat had a beak-shaped cut in her ear and a bald spot on her head from this bird that would attack her. I was fortunate enough to witness the occasion where she finally got revenge on the bird.

It had been pecking at one of the grandkittens and then flew away just too low, and grandma cat did a lightning-fat swipe in the air and just kept walking along like nothing had happened, not looking at the bird. The bird kept flying and flapped its wings like 2 more times, then fell to the ground dead, completely ignored by the cat.

It was the most badass samurai shit I've ever seen.
Don't know for birds but apparently they can win a fight with snake because they have better reaction time. So maybe something similar is contributing here too
Patience mostly I think. At least with rodent they smell a trail and then just sit there for hours and hours until one walks near enough.
They're kind of the perfect predators, and birds need to land sometime.

Basically their only weak point, biologically, is their kidneys.
Birdbrains

Who even uses cat? Use less or tail.

Keeping your cats indoors won't solve anything. Housecats aren't destroying the bird population, feral cats are. If you want to help, volunteer with your local vet or animal control to capture, spay/neuter, then re-release stray cats.

Not true. Pet cats are about a third of the problem, according to a 2013 nature paper. Feral populations vary a lot by location - some places have almost no ferals but lots of pet cats.

Sauce: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
- That study's been going around for years in the media, but mainly because it's sensational. If you actually read the article, I'd hardly say it's very convincing, or very accurate. Also, this.
  
  Existing estimates of mortality from cat predation are speculative and not based on scientific data13,14,15,16 or, at best, are based on extrapolation of results from a single study18. In addition, no large-scale mortality estimates exist for mammals, which form a substantial component of cat diets.
- "About a third of the problem" So, not the primary cause (or solution.)
  
  https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380
  
  "We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality."
  
  The article also states the following regarding more popular studies in the media involving pet cats: "The magnitude of mortality they cause in mainland areas remains speculative, with large-scale estimates based on non-systematic analyses and little consideration of scientific data"
- Indoor cats are not a problem because they are indoors. Outdoor cats thar come inside sometimes are a problem indeed but most of them were not adopted they just apeared out of nowhere and you now think it's your cat. So it was feral at some point or at least was born from one.
It will solve for your cat staying not dead, not shitting in other people's yards, and not fucking other cats.
- Maybe, depending on where you live. But that's not what we're discussing.
As Bob would have wanted. RIP in peace, my sweet prince.

Don't blame cats

I'm a fat cat now
- ~~Fucking furball.~~ Fluffy!
Those aren't birds, that's chicken. Dummy.
OK, now I'm hungry.

Why is the bar for Windows as long as the bar for cats?

Because it's by area, not length.
- It never even occurred to me to consider the height of the boxes lol
The area isnt the same though.
- As are the numbers
https://i.imgur.com/qeccUlZ.png

On a serious note, the problem with wind turbines is not the total number of birds they strike but the species. Larger birds of prey seem particularly susceptible. Tough this risk can be easily mitigated by not placing the wind turbines directly in their primary habitat or migration paths.

I was going to say, I doubt your pet tabby is killing any California condors at any appreciable rate.

Amazing how easy it is to bias people with data though.

I'm still not calling it GNU

3.5 billion birds are killed in North America per year? I didn't know anywhere near that number even existed.

But then again...

Wikipedia says there are about 7.5 million square miles in the US and Canada, so that's over 400 birds killed per square mile, per year, on average.

That's amazing, no?

Misconception. Birdkiller Georg has 3 billion dead birds a year and is also known as New York City
You forgot to include Mexico, but even with it it's pretty high.
- I checked again and yeah, it's more like 9.5 million square miles, so an average of more like 370 bird deaths per square mile, per year. But now that I know that includes chickens and turkeys, and Mexico and Greenland and the Bahamas, it's OK.
not if we have anything to say about it

-Cats
There are more than 8 billion chickens slaughtered every year in the US alone, to give some perspective.

I misread it as "Widows" and got a bit concerned for a second.

Probably plenty of bird widows in the world
The dream.

I pointed this out to people who complain constantly about wind turbines. "Ban windows!" They love that.

Don't need windows if you live in a basement (and use Linux).

wait, so if windows are so high. What about like, the rest of the building?

I think windows are that high because birds think they can go through them, they probably don't think they can go through buildings, but who knows?
- i would assume so, but most sky scrapers are entirely glass, and those technically aren't windows from the outside. So do those count?
  
  Though i guess they also have air patterns surrounding them that would make it difficult to bonk into.
Not sure if you're making a joke, but windows kill birds because they're transparent and birds fly into them not realizing it's there. The rest of the building doesn't really kill birds because they won't fly into it.
- mostly musing on the clarification of what a window is, because not all windows are transparent, in fact, the majority of them, i would venture to argue, are not.
  
  Skyscrapers are weird.

I know a lot of people don't like Andrew Lloyd Webber but killing yourself is a bit much

I see no lies

Worst birdkiller is Musk

But seriously, your cats are fucking the ecosystem up

Cats shouldn’t have access to windows.

Is the plural for CAT cable really Cats and not CAT cables?

Guess it is like mouses for more than one computer mouse.

TIL.

What's up with comms towers? High-voltage AM antennas are not that abundant anymore. Are birds getting cooked close to high-power transmitters? Shot to avoid interference with crucial military infrastructure? Is 5G real?

Well the image claims to be based on data from 2015, so no 5G was not real at that time.
- That was a joke, and so was the previous sentence (a reference to the birdsarentreal conspiracy. Seriously, how do comms towers harm birds?
  
  Edit: collisions with tall AM towers' guy wires

Just curious but how are Comm towers killing birds? Do they fly into them or something?

I def have more penguins than windows in my house.

So pollution doesn't kill birds at all? Ok..

Why should it? It doesn't kill humans, or at least we really don't attribute very many deaths directly to pollution (even though we know it leads to all sorts of cancers and respiratory issues).

After all, if pollution could kill people, why would anybody modify their truck to "roll coal"? That'd practically manslaughter on a very long time scale.

Why would we be using fossil fuels at all, for cars or for power or for lawnmowers or anything, really. The sale and distribution of fossil fuels would be on the scale of committing genocide.
- Yea u got it

Is this even a meme? It's a screenshot of yet another Windows/windows joke.