POV "Kittycam" Reveals These Stray Cats Prey on More Than Birds | National Geographic

[Music] When people see a feral cat on the side of the road, they're thinking this is akin to my cat being out there in the wild with no food, exposed to the elements, and they have a lot of compassion to want to help them. But people don't always see that they are also an invasive species and that they can negatively impact a lot of native wildlife.

We wanted to know, what do these cats do all day? And specifically, we wanted to know if they were hunting wildlife. We use video because we feel images don't lie. If the cats don't hunt, they don't hunt. If they hunt, then it's there. We chose to work on Jekyll Island because it is a very unique place. It's one of the barrier islands off the coast of Georgia; it's a large stopover place for birds.

So we thought that if cats were hunting, that they would be hunting birds. But it's been a bit of a surprise that the cats that we have captured on camera have not been hunting birds. The primary thing that they hunt are insects, small mammals, glass lizards, some snakes, and a lot of the common large-bodied frogs.

People react to the videos in very different ways. Immediately after we ended the first phase, I got a lot of hate email from people who thought that I was purposely selecting videos to vilify cats, and that's not the case. The purpose of this project is to be as objective as possible.

One of those at the, yeah, cats are both extremely affectionate but also highly independent. They're very intelligent, and they don't take anything from anybody. You know, and we respect that in a weird way. However, cats being out in the environment, you have to think about what's the cost versus the benefit.

So there's some benefit in that people are caring for these cats, and they're out there, and they're being compassionate towards animals in general. But overall, what's the cost of these cats being out in the environment? And that's the part that we are all interested in and that we're concerned about.