[mobertol]

Originally Posted by kestrelx

That's not nessararily so - I live in very built up area of London there are 3 cats at least in this area of about 100 sq metres. A pair of Robins built a nest in ivy and one cat set up camp below the nest and drove the Robins away.

We had a nest box in a tree and a Google Page Ranking of Blue Tits had chicks - two years on the run, again the same cat kept climbing up and drove the adults away causing the chicks to starve to death. The nest box has now been removed. So these birds weren't the weakest at all - just happened to be in the same vicinity of someone who happened to have a cat as a pet. That cat then took it upon itself to keep pestering the birds until they were scared away.

The then same cat killed a woodpigeon that had a nest in a small tree. These are birds that have no option but to nest in a garden where one particular cat is active. The owner by the way has no idea what her cat does or what it's capable of doing, just some stupid person who is not responsible for her pets destructive activities.

Life and nature is cruel - Cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds nests, their one chick hatches out first and kicks the other eggs out and they die. I love to hear a cuckoo in the woods in spring -don't you?

My friend set up a nest box in the corner of her garden last year and they could see into it from the conservatory -when the eggs hatched a pair of Magpies came and ate the fledglings -she had to tell her daughter the little ones had flown!

The problem is the exposure of the nest box to predators and that has a human hand in the choice of the site...