Germany’s felines kill more than 50 million birds each year. To protect a small population of crested larks, one town has forbidden cats to go outside during breeding season—and pet owners aren’t pleased.
Regine Tredwell decided to become a cat owner in 2009, shortly after she divorced the father of her two young daughters. “I wanted the kids to grow up with pets, to learn how to treat animals right,” she told me. A dog seemed like too much responsibility, so she took the girls to visit a neighbor whose family cat had given birth to a calico kitten with white boots and a pink nose.
As families moved into the subdivision, Fischer worried about predators that might harm the larks. He told me that he pleaded with residents, both in letters and in person, to keep their cats indoors while the larks were breeding. Still, he said, his team saw cats stalking crested-lark territories—in one case, on the same day that eggs disappeared from a nest. By 2022, only two crested-lark pairs could be found breeding in the area.
Of course, crested larks are not native to construction sites in the way that panda bears are native to bamboo forests. They scramble our expectations about endangered species: what kind of rare bird arrivesbulldozers clear a meadow? In parts of Baden-Württemberg, Lepp found crested larks nesting in the weedy borders of grocery-store parking lots. “Some of the birds have specialized in feeding on bread crumbs,” he told me. “The larks are walking into the bakery.
As a city person, I have always thought of the countryside as close to nature—but many rural animals, struggling to survive in agricultural landscapes, are now seeking refuge in denser human settlements. Urban wastelands are becoming sanctuaries for rural birds; scientists in Czechia, where the crested-lark population has fallen by two-thirds since the nineteen-seventies, discovered the birds nesting in abandoned commercial developments, where native weeds still grow.
Many residents of Walldorf started to think that efforts to enforce the lockdown went too far. “There were people running around taking pictures, trying to gather information about the cats,” Marine Vetter, a local cat owner, told me. The country’s largest newspaper, the tabloid, reported that locals received a letter asking them to report cat sightings to Fischer’s team. The paper called Fischer and his employees the “Katzen-Stasi.
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