It is likely that seabird species smaller than Cory’s shearwater formed a large part of the diet of cats on Corvo in the past (Monteiro, Ramos & Furness, 1996). As these seabird

species were not found in cat scats in our study, cats likely exterminated accessible colonies of these species (Fitzgerald et al., 1991). Without the availability of introduced rodents as alternative prey, the feral cat population would not have survived the extermination of an important food source, highlighting the adverse effect of introduced learn more rodents in supplementing predator populations on islands. We found no evidence that seasonally varying abundance of prey taxa explained variation in the home-range size of domestic cats. Instead, home-ranges were

extremely variable among individuals and seasons as has been found elsewhere (0.3–69.0 ha; Metsers, Seddon & van Heezik, 2010, 0.5–21.8 ha; van Heezik et al., 2010). While confined cats that receive sufficient food from human buy Anti-infection Compound Library owners may not need to adjust their roaming behaviour to prey availability, even the unconfined cats in our study did not display a consistent response to the availability of prey that we measured. Because cats appear to be generalist predators, the roaming behaviour may be controlled by factors other than food requirements, such as temperature, photoperiod, precipitation or territoriality (Goszczynski, Krauze & Gryz, 2009). Overall, we found high individual variation in home-range size, and all our covariate subgroups therefore had small sample

sizes, rendering their mean size estimates less robust. selleck kinase inhibitor We found a small positive effect of age on home-range size, possibly because young cats show reduced dispersal behaviour until they are 1–3 years old (Liberg, 1980). Confined cats had generally smaller home-ranges than unconfined cats, and tended to roam less far from their home (Fig. 3), therefore cat owners could be encouraged to confine the cat to the immediate vicinity of the house. If individual cats display consistent individual roaming behaviour, identifying and constraining the widest roaming cats may be easier to implement than other generally applicable cat constraint approaches (Calver et al., 2011). Another potential management option is to restrict cat ownership in human settlements that are too close to vulnerable native wildlife congregations such as seabird colonies. Our study shows that confined cats are less likely to roam very far, but that some unconfined cats can move >10 km in a single night. On average, however, movements were within a 1-km radius around the owner’s house, and impacts on native wildlife are presumably greatest within this radius. The tracking of cats with GPS loggers provided a great opportunity to assess the spatial impact of domestic cats on native wildlife.