Cats often play - and often that wounds birds and cats don't have clean wounds. I'm not going to argue it, studies have been done which show that cats, not being a native part of the local food chain do decimate bird and small mammal populations - you can look at the links I posted which do link to independent studies of what effect cats have on the native wildlife and cats do contribute to the decline in bird populations. Yes, there are a lot of other factors that contribute to the decline in bird populations... But the term I used was part of the decline. Not are solely responsible for.

And the number of people that claim "oh my cat doesn't eat/kill birds" is just silly.

No raccoons in my Mom's yard (least never been seen in the last 30 odd years) - the cats which hang out underneath the bushes right next to the ponds are a slight indication that they're the ones going after the fish - ocassionally a deer will fall in the pond, but it's usually fairly obvious when that's happened and there's fish death from that.