Fig. 6.12.

Modelled distribution of the number of birds, reptiles, and mammals killed by feral cats per km2 per year across natural landscapes in Australia. Note the markedly higher numbers of individual animals killed by cats in more open arid and semi-arid central Australia, with fewer killed in the forests and woodlands of the higher rainfall coastal fringe. Not obvious in these maps, because of the scale, is the high numbers of birds killed by cats on islands, especially smaller islands. Introduced species (especially rabbits, rodents) can make up a large component of a cat’s take of mammals; to illustrate this the map in the bottom right shows the proportion of all mammal prey that are native. Over half the mammal prey in the southern part of the continent are introduced species, but this reverses in the northern half of the continent, where more native prey are taken. (Modified from Woinarski et al. 2017a, 2018b; Murphy, unpubl.).