You are very lucky. The last place I lived, the birds almost all disappeared over the course of about five years.
When i first moved there, I couldn't sleep past 5:30am because of the raucous dawn chorus. There were always birds around, and i had several feeders for them all.
By the time I moved away, the chorus was one bird. Maybe. And the feeders never got used.
From what I read on the internet, this is becoming more and more common.
That said, I don’t know what success looks like over different kinds of prey. Over the last year or so we’ve also had a pretty bad outbreak of avian flu which has done a lot to depress bird populations—though my understanding is it has been mainly farmed chickens and turkeys that have been hard hit.
> In one night, a black-footed cat kills between 10 and 14 rodents or small birds, averaging a kill about every 50 minutes, according to Hunter. With a 60 percent success rate, black-footed cats are about three times as successful as lions, which average a successful kill about 20 to 25 percent of the time, Hunter said.
Compare with the domestic house cat - https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.12563
> Owners reported that their pets killed an average of 3.5 prey items/month, leading to an estimated ecological impact per cat of 14.2-38.9 prey ha^−1 yr^−1. This is similar or higher than the per-animal ecological impact of wild carnivores but the effect is amplified by the high density of cats in neighborhoods. As a result, pet cats around the world have an ecological impact greater than native predators but concentrated within ~100 m of their homes.
Related...
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
> We estimate that cats in the contiguous United States annually kill between 1.3 and 4.0 billion birds (median=2.4 billion) (Fig. 1a), with ∼69% of this mortality caused by un-owned cats. The predation estimate for un-owned cats was higher primarily due to predation rates by this group averaging three times greater than rates for owned cats.
I think owners would not be aware of a lot of a cat's hunting activity if it has access to the outdoors.
There is a massive red tailed hawk population. And a moderate Bald Eagle population. Hell, we have started getting Pelicans the last few years, and I simply would not put it past them to swallow a moderate sized mammal.
The Canada Geese and turkeys would win in a fight any day.
It is anecdotal, but it seems to me as waterways become less polluted, you are starting to see these sorts of animals return to even dense urban areas like Chicago.
My son and I are actually gathering data of bird populations in our immediate area. We live in an urban area where half the block consists of 2-3 family apartments. Our yard is a bird highway due to where our home is placed and the trees. The tenants tend to migrate in cohorts. We noticed anecdotally that the bird population grew a year after a few key neighbors, who kept outdoor cats and were cat people who fed strays, moved away.
It’s a difficult issue as like many things, extreme behavior drives extreme outcomes. I’d like to understand the impact of house cats vs mentally ill people who attract feral cats. (Or similar folks who attract disruptive populations of birds like pigeons)