Wild Thing: Domestic Cats Stick To Residential Areas When Out And About

New findings published in the Journal of Mammalogy reveal where 74 million pet cats spend their time when away from home.

The analysis of over 2,100 sites showed that instead of venturing into parks and protected areas where coyotes roam, these domesticated hunters are most likely to stick to residential areas. The study is part of the eMammal project, meaning that it enables citizen scientists to collaborate with other researchers at the Smithsonian Institution and NC State University to better examine certain animal activities.

"Domestic cats are estimated to kill billions of birds and small mammals each year," says lead study author Roland Kays, a zoologist with NC State's College of Natural Resources and the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, in a news release. "Knowing where they hunt helps assess the risk to wildlife."

Researchers used camera trap data collected by hundreds of students and citizen scientists in six Eastern states. Then, they analyzed millions of image data from motion-sensitive cameras located in 32 protected sites and urban neighborhoods of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Many groups of cats were concentrated in large numbers along residential areas and small urban forests along Raleigh's greenway trails. And the more coyotes in certain areas, the less likely cats were to venture nearby.

"We detected cats 300 times more often in residential yards, where coyotes are rare, than in parks," Kays adds.

However, the one area where both animals overlapped was small urban woodlots.

"Most parks had no cats at all," Kays says. "Our cameras photographed a single cat at some parks, but we only found evidence for more than one cat in two of the 32 parks we surveyed."

Another interesting aspect of the study was that cats that ventured into nature preserves kept the same nocturnal schedules as coyotes, while those in residential areas were diurnal.