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Science pokes under the sofa, bats around a few ideas

The most common myth that people have about cats is that they're solitary, asocial creatures, fumes Sharon L. Crowell-Davis, a behavioral veterinarian at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Supposed standoffishness hurts an animal's image, says Crowell-Davis, and she diagnoses the perceived aloofness of Felis catus as the main contributor to outbursts of anticatism. Which species provided the devious villains in the recent movie Cats & Dogs, for example? Not the romping, barking pack. And don't even get her started on the humor book that lists a hundred and one uses for a dead cat.

Crowell-Davis contends that even in the scientific community, stereotypes of cat asociality persist. In the literature, "I've read that because cats don't form [a particular kind of] dominance hierarchy, that's evidence of their nonsocial behavior," she says. "And then I read that cats do form that hierarchy, and that's evidence of their nonsocial nature."

The simplest definition of a social species requires its members to form stable relationships, she explains, and several decades of fieldwork have documented them in cats, from the English dockyards to the Forum in Rome. Crowell-Davis, in fact, is convinced that "there's a lot of politics in a cat colony."

Interpreting social structures is only one of the fascinations of watching groups of cats. Other researchers are turning to domestic cats to answer questions about mating systems and the impact of hunting by clustered animals. Also, some scientists are tackling the question of whether Fluffy and Tiger's endearing quirks represent an animal version of personality.

Showing that a species forms social groups takes a bit more than spotting two animals in the same place, cautions David MacDonald of Oxford University in England. He and two of his Oxford colleagues reviewed studies of cat sociality and published their conclusions in the 2000 update of the behavioral classic The Domestic Cat (2000, D. Turner and P. Bateson, eds., Cambridge University Press).

Analyses in the 1970s tended to treat clusters of cats as a bunch of asocial loners drawn to the same resource, MacDonald recalls. He led a study of three colonies of free-living cats, such as those hanging out around a farmer's barn. The researchers kept track of which cats hunkered down within 5 meters of each other, a task that required 59,000 observations of several dozen cats.

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A pair of acrobatic American goldfinches alight on a cylindrical hanging bird feeder, hungrily searching for thistle seeds. A shadow plays across them, and the goldfinches dive to the safety of a nearby shrub. A large hairy woodpecker lands on a nearby feeder filled with peanuts. Relieved, the goldfinches dart back to the thistle feeder.

Nearly a third of North America's adult population enjoys bird feeding, according to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (CLO). Feeding birds is an excellent way for people to learn about wildlife, says Allison Wells, CLO communications and outreach director. "It's relaxing and enjoyable, and people who start out feeding birds often become good stewards of the land."

Because some people worry that bird feeding disrupts natural patterns, the practice has long been debated by the environmental, bird-watching and home-owning communities. The National Bird-Feeding Society (NBFS) says bird feeding has only positive effects on the environment. John Bianchi, spokesperson for the National Audubon Society, adds, "Wild bird feeding is all pros and no cons." He says bird feeders help offset pressures from development, pollution, pesticides and the widespread planting of non-native vegetation. "Despite common beliefs," says Bianchi, "there is no evidence that feeding wild birds changes their migratory patterns or makes them in any way dependent on people."

Go Wild

Sue Wells, NBFS executive director, says the society's goal is to help people use their yards to give something back to birds and wildlife. She says, "The green carpet lawn is not attractive to any birds except, perhaps, robins." The NBFS urges people to "leave it wild" by planting native plants and grasses, making brush piles, tending hedge rows, leaving dead trees in place, keeping house cats indoors and allowing patches of land to develop naturally wherever possible.

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