Migrating songbirds face multiple human-caused hazards including building collisions, light pollution, and cat predation. Targeted interventions significantly reduce mortality.
Migrating songbird welfare is dominated by the scale of preventable human-caused mortality. Window collisions cause immediate trauma and death; survival of stunned birds is possible with proper care but many die from internal injuries. Cat predation causes enormous individual welfare harm — domestic and feral cats kill not just to eat but as predatory expression, and caught birds suffer significantly before death. The welfare and conservation cases align completely: reducing collision, light pollution, and cat predation benefits individual birds and maintains the population-level services that migratory birds provide.