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THE AGE-OLD battle between Sylvester and Tweetypie - or for younger readers, the hungry cat and the defenceless bird - may be about to change in its fundamentals.

According to the British Trust for Ornithology, millions of birds may be savedthanks to a cat collar that bleeps a warning of the wearer's presence. The battery-powered CatAlert collar emits a bleep every seven seconds and so frustrates the principal hunting stratagem of many moggies - the sudden ambush from concealment.

The trust, Britain's leading bird research organisation, has conducted trials on CatAlert, invented by Dr Liam Martin, a senior research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University - and says it works.

"On average, cats in the trials caught a bird every week when the CatAlert was not in use," the trust said in a statement. "When the same cats wore the CatAlert bleeping collar, they only caught a bird every 2.5 weeks." The trust adds: "This might seem a small difference. However, there are an estimated eight million cats in the UK. If only one million of our cats kill a bird a week, fitting bleepers to them might reduce the birds killed by these cats from about 50 million to about 20 million, possibly saving as many as 30 million birds every year!"

The trial, conducted with 50 pet cats across the country, showed little effect on the number of rats, mice and other mammals taken.

Dr Martin, an instrumentation expert, dreamt up the collar after reading a newspaper correspondence about feline predation of garden songbirds. "Bells didn't seem to be effective because cats hold their heads stationary when stalking, so they don't ring," he said. The owner of two cats, neither of which is a great hunter, Dr Martin was awarded a grant by the Department of Trade and Industry to develop the device, and has had money from the EU to improve it further.

One cat owner who swears by the CatAlert is farmer's wife Annette Beynon, who lives near Swansea. "Our tortoiseshell cat Tegwyn kills all sorts of songbirds, blackbirds, thrushes, blue tits and wrens, as well as mice and voles and baby rabbits. She's even killed a half- grown stoat.

"We love our birds, so we cut her claws and made her wear an enormous bear bell, which people use in Canada to let bears know they are coming. She still caught the birds, because she managed not to make a noise with the bell. But now when she's hiding in the bushes, the collar gives it away. She still catches mice, but she doesn't get birds any more. We think it's really good."

"A bird in the hand," Dr Martin sums up, "is worth two in the cat."

# posted by Medical Information : 2:46 AM