Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.
I.e. cats might kill more birds and mammals than humans.
Humanity has a cost on nature, that should be mitigated.
Humans like domestic cats, which is one contributor to the overall human-induced reduction in biodiversity.
I wonder also whether there's something about towns/cities that makes birds flourish, compared to other wild animals.
I would assume it has got do with the reason pigeons are sometimes called "flying rats", i.e. they can subsist on human trash, can survive in the environment and are not seen as negatively as rats and thus have less pest-control efforts pointed at them.
(Genuine Q. I don't know anything about what biodiversity folk look for.)
Humans are very good at introducing invasive species (domestic cat, kudzu) and pretty bad at forseeing the impact they have
Their predators are more scared of humans, enough to avoid urban areas. Most suburbs are kept in unnatural states with lawns and inedible plants, giving the predators no place to live. Some birds are capable of learning which humans are "safe" and which should be avoided.
Well yeah obviously. Cats kill relatively few humans, they're too little
They're counting cat-caused as anthropogenic i.e. part of anthropos-caused aka human-caused. And "single largest group" could be 1% if there are a lot of groups and each happens to be smaller than 1%.