National Geographic: The Secret Life of Cats Page #4

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She's really surprised us on

the amount of carnage.

I've got to say that

it's really shocked me

when we started

counting them up.

In the last two weeks she's

brought in maybe 30, 36... plus

maybe a dozen or so that

we've let go.

And I think that's a little

bit too much, really.

Well,

I'm quite proud to think

that she was one of

the top cats.

But knowing how much stuff

I didn't write down

Because

I wasn't here to see it,

um, I think she's actually

the top cat.

For many a cat, such

extraordinary hunting prowess

at one time translated into a

ticket to travel the world.

They kept stowaway

rats at bay...

But not all the cats

that left port

made the long journey home.

Some jumped ship and soon had

a foothold in a new frontier

New Zealand is a unique place.

Like many islands,

its wildlife evolved with

few natural predators.

Today, rare shore birds still

lay their eggs

on the sandy beaches-

completely exposed.

Attentive parents

tend to their chicks,

but their nests

are vulnerable.

Until recently,

the system worked fine.

But today, New Zealand's shore

birds are in trouble.

Here at

Mangawhai Wildlife Refuge,

the fairy tern is down to

less than six breeding pairs.

Each chick represents the

future of the species.

With the

Department of Conservation,

Richard Parrish

and Leigh Honnor

are part of a team trying to

save the last of

the fairy terns-

and Mangawhai's other

threatened species.

Five years ago,

they found themselves

confronted with a mystery:

Something was

killing the chicks-

and no one knew what.

The team had to do a little

undercover work.

One year we lost a lot of

nests of the fairy terns

and we didn't know

who was doing it,

so we decided to set up

an infrared camera

and try and work out who was

taking the eggs and the chicks

The new lens is good,

isn't it?

The wide-eyed angle lens...

Oh, it is.

...taking in a much bigger

field of view.

Well,

those chicks will probably

stay here another day.

You think so?

Initially, we set it up on a

Caspian tern colony,

just to get used to

the equipment and iron

out the problems.

What they discovered

was both alarming...

. and macabre.

We ended up catching a cat

on film,

and over four nights,

that cat took out 40 chicks.

The interesting thing for me

was that the cat

only ate the heads.

They left the bodies behind.

Over the next four years,

they trained the camera

on various nests and found

more gruesome evidence

against the alien predator.

As a result, feral cats

are now being eradicated

in Mangawhai Park.

New Zealand

is just one example

of what can happen

when a cat comes to stay.

Here, in a land where

temperatures can soar to 120

and there's often

no water in sight,

it's hard to imagine

any creature

surviving for long... but the

cat has adapted once again.

In the middle of

Australia's Outback,

it must eat

whatever it can find-

be it road kill

or Australia's

endangered wildlife.

Bilbies, bandicoots,

and other rare marsupials

have been pushed

to the edge of extinction

by a barrage of pressures,

including introduced species.

One of the culprits

is the cat.

For at least a century,

feral cats have roamed

this harsh expanse.

And yet they remain elusive...

...even to those

whose ancestors were

here long before them.

In an effort to unlock

their secrets,

Parks and Wildlife

biologist Rachel Paltridge

has enlisted the help

of experts.

Searching for a cat

in the Outback

is like looking for

a needle in a haystack.

Yet these Aboriginal trackers

are able to read even

the most elusive signs

in the shadows of the sand.

So the p*ssy cat,

him sitting down,

jumping here, jumped there,

jumped there, and over there...

With their extraordinary

expertise,

Rachel has begun to unravel

the secrets of the cat

Where's that p*ssy cat now-

long ways?

Must be a long ways off.

With their greater insight,

she hopes that, someday,

cat numbers

will be controlled.

They're a pretty amazing animal

you have to respect them.

But they just don't

belong out here.

They didn't evolve out here.

The native animals

didn't evolve with

them and just can't really

tolerate their predation.

Hopefully, this work will lead

to a better understanding

of feral cats and eventually

lead to better management.

To reveal the patterns of

these elusive predators,

Rachel uses radio telemetry,

tracking individual cats

over time.

Finding them is

only half the challenge.

Feral cats are as ferocious

as any wild animal.

Before handling one,

Rachel must first

anesthetize it.

Cat bites are not only

dangerous to prey,

they can infect

humans as well.

We caught this cat

about four months ago,

using the Aboriginal

trackers to catch it,

and radio collared it,

and we've been following

its movement patterns

in those last four months.

This cat normally

only roams over about

two or three kilometers a day

and he has a fairly

tight home range

that he lives in.

He's lost about 300 grams

in the last four months.

I don't know if its maybe

times are getting a bit tough

there may be a bit

less food around.

I just wanted to check that

his collar was still okay

and not rubbing on his neck

and just check

his general condition.

But he's fine, so we'll

just let him go here

and continue tracking him.

Any cats that are not part

of Rachel's study

might find another

fate awaits them.

It is a twist of irony:

the cat has helped push

much of the Aborigine's

traditional food prey

to near extinction.

In doing so, it now fills an

important niche itself.

Like a game of cat and mouse-

in this scenario,

it is the cat that

has become the mouse.

Going to cook this one up

for supper tonight?

Yeah. Good meat.

These people

have been eating cats

all their lives and it's quite

an important part of their diet

So they'll probably cook

it up on the fire tonight.

Good bush meat? Yeah.

Now that the bilbies,

bandicoots

and other medium-sized mammals

have all but disappeared,

the cat has taken a place

in the food chain.

Back at camp,

Rachel collects

as much information

as possible before the cat

becomes dinner for the trackers

I'm trying to look at

the predation pressure

on all the wildlife out there

in the Spinnefex Grasslands

and I'm looking at

gut contents as probably

the best way

of understanding

what they eat.

This cat was obviously

a very good hunter.

You can see quite plainly

each object's

quite intact still.

What's this one, snake?

He's got a little snake

in here.

Well,

there's heaps in his stomach.

There's three different

sorts of lizards,

three of these

military dragons,

one quite large...

and there's also

some remains of

some bird feathers.

So you can

just see how much of

an impact they're

probably having

on the native wildlife out

there if just each cat eats

that much in just one day.

Ideally, we'd like to

get rid of them altogether

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