Hopes Bruny Island’s new cat centre will help manage stray and feral felines

Hopes Bruny Island’s new cat centre will help manage stray and feral felines

The average domestic cat looks far from an apex predator.

Key points:

• A cat management facility is opening on Bruny Island, in a bid to manage the island’s long-standing feral cat problem
• The centre will offer de-sexing, re-homing and assistance in trapping cats
• It’s hoped the facility will be a model for the rest of Australia when it comes to managing feral cats

But on Bruny Island, off Tasmania’s south-east coast, they might as well be. Feral, stray and pet cats hunt native wildlife, unchecked at the top of the food chain.

Paul Davis owns a property on the Bruny Island Neck, the isthmus connecting the northern and southern parts of the island.

It is home to a shearwater and penguin rookery, and eastern quolls are abundant on the property.

Mr Davis has worked for many years to help preserve the area so local wildlife can flourish.

He said it was heartbreaking seeing the damage cats did to native populations.

“When you see a feral cat the size of a dog almost and you realise what it can do then, yes, it is upsetting,” Mr Davis said.

“Finding penguin wings, which seems to be the bit they leave behind, is very distressing,” he said.

“Certainly when family members and I see that sort of thing, you groan and worry about it.

“It’s clear that they are a major competitor with a lot of our local species, but also that they’re impacting on those species as well.”

The large feral cat population has been a major problem for years.

New facility a ‘game changer’

It is hoped a new cat management centre on the island will go some way to help fixing the problem.

The facility has been jointly built by the Kingborough Council and Ten Lives, Tasmania’s largest cat shelter and cat management organisation.

Until now, if locals had a cat to be desexed or re-homed, they had to undertake a four-hour round trip to Tasmania’s mainland via ferry.

Noel Hunt from Ten Lives said the facility would be a place community members could conveniently use.

“Importantly, it will give people a place to go if they’ve got stray cats that they’ve trapped,” Mr Hunt said.

“At the moment there is nowhere to bring a lost cat, a stray cat, a feral cat, an injured cat on the island, so this is going to address that so that the cats can then be appropriately assessed and brought up to us,” he said.

Mr Hunt said the project was helping “write the book” on cat management.

“It really is a model for delivering cat management facility services in remote and regional parts of Tasmania, indeed Australia, because if you look around Tasmania there’s not many parts of the state that are served by a cat management facility, and this is testing the model,” he said.

Islands ‘vulnerable’ to cat predation

Bruny Island is a hotspot for biodiversity and unique wildlife.

At least 13 native mammal and 50 native bird species on the island are at risk of feral cat predation.

They include the endangered eastern quoll, hooded plover, forty-spotted pardalote, short-tailed shearwater, sooty shearwater, little penguin and long-nosed potoroo.

Kingborough Council cat management officer Kaylene Allan said like other islands, Bruny was a popular breeding ground for sea birds.

“They’re like a banquet for cats … because they all come in at a certain time and they breed and there can be hundreds, thousands of birds,” Ms Allan said.

“[The cats] don’t have to go far. They can just eat to their heart’s content and keep reproducing, and consequently their numbers get really high.”

Ms Allan said on the Bruny Island Neck, home to one of the largest seabird colonies on the island, the council had identified densities of feral cats of about 50 cats per square kilometre.

“In a natural environment you might actually get one cat per three to four square kilometres, or you might get at the most five cats per square kilometre,” she said.

While the council didn’t yet know exactly what the impact of cats was when it came to depleting other wildlife populations on the island, it was estimated domestic cats alone in the Kingborough municipality killed more than 600,000 native mammals, birds and reptiles a year.

The island makes up half of the council area’s land mass.

Community help needed to keep cats under control

The new cat centre is one part of the Bruny Island Cat Management project, started in July 2016 with Federal Government funding.

The project involves conducting research about the impact of feral cats, as well as creating solutions.

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Mr Hunt said the cat management facility itself was not a silver bullet, and that cat owners needed to continue being responsible.

“The Kingborough council has introduced by-laws that now mean cats [on Bruny Island] need to be contained … we also need to provide the incentive and information that that’s a really good option for the safety of their cat and the good of the environment,” he said.

The council estimated there were more than 40 cat owners on the island, 60 per cent of whom complied fully with the council’s by-laws.

Paul Davis said the cat management initiative was welcome.

“The community support on Bruny for this project is very high… you don’t even see the tip of the iceberg in terms of the damage that is done and people realise that,” Mr Davis said.