Researcher uses night cam footage to find friend's cat eating vulnerable dotterel eggs

Thursday, 23 January 2020

Night cam footage catches domestic cats licking eggs in dotterel nest.

A conservationist tracking sea birds nesting on her local beach visited a cat owner and found a dead nationally vulnerable dotterel under the table.

Researcher Ailsa Howard put a camera out at night, to work out what was targeting the banded dotterel nests in South Bay, Kaikōura. She was getting worried when their eggs kept disappearing.

She found cats and hedgehogs were the most common predators, but as she looked back on the footage, she saw the stripes of a familiar feline.

Dotterels numbers are dwindling against predators like cats and hedgehogs.

It was a cat burglar and it belonged to her friend.

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'I recognised the cat. I had pictures of that cat as a kitten,' Howard said.

'I went and saw the owner and there was a dead dotterel under the table.'

Banded dotterel are considered nationally vulnerable and were being monitored in South Bay as part of an ongoing study.

'I don't think anyone wants their cat to go out and kill dotterels. Everyone hopes it's not their cat, but this is going on all the time.'

A cat tracking map showing the great distance one cat traveled.

She said people needed to realise their cat was a 'top level predator'.

'Our birds have no defences, and can be smelt so easily.

'People need to be aware of this, and need to engage in the conversation and be open to the fact that their animal impacts native wildlife.'

Howard had been studying the dotterel for five years along the Kaikōura Peninsula, and said numbers were believed to have decreased nationally.

Dotterel numbers were falling because they had evolved to protect themselves only from other birds, and hadn't learned to cope with mammalian predators.

Cats had been seen on monitoring cameras checking the eggs before they hatched, and this was the first year she had also witnessed a dog eat dotterel eggs.

She teamed up with her friend and placed a tracker on their cat. They discovered it 'loved the beach' and roamed 'way further than they ever realised'.

The cat was now being kept in at night.

She was finishing up the data from this season's nesting at South Bay, which she calls a 'hot-spot' for dotterel, but monitoring showed another year of 'extremely concerning' results.

'I don't see as many birds flocking as I used to. Areas where I used to see nests consistently, I don't see those.'

As a cat is thought to have decimated a population of dotterel in Eastbourne, Wellington, Howard urged owners to consider keeping them inside.

She understood the 'culture' was to let cats out at night, but thought 'cat containment' was needed.