Since you didn’t name the species, it’s hard to say whether they’re common or not, or verify that their populations remain stable while an ever increasing number of cats are given an unrestricted license to kill anything that moves if it happens to be small enough.

Relevant: “Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats' impacts on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information“

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.1553

so statistically speaking, yes - because many domestic cats live near small gardens.

But there are lots of ground-nesting birds that have been decimated by cats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduced_mammals_on_seabird_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

I found the cognitive dissonance comment interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife#Cat_...

They do not just kill "common" birds, they have led to the extinction of several bird species. Keep your cats indoors.

> Keep your cats indoors

Are cats not naturally supposed to be outside?

There’s nothing natural about a domesticated species being spread around the world and allowed to roam free while simultaneously receiving care and protection from humans.

Cats can live happy lives inside, they just need a bit of attention.

Ours get a couple of hours supervised outside time whilst on long leads. They can and do carry out hunting behaviours, but being on a tether and being supervised allows us to dramatically reduce their impact on wildlife to almost nothing.

Considering what they do attempt to catch whilst we are standing their, I'd imagine they would take a dramatic toll if we just let them roam free.

And only implied in your comment: they should not be alone. Not an excuse to go full catlady as 2 are plenty.

They are (in nearly every country) a foreign invasive species, so “naturally” they shouldn’t be there at all.

Aren't all animals?

I guess the ones meant to live in caves or underground would do fine indoors?

Not in North America!

Apex predators are surprisingly important, far out of proportion to their numbers.

Efforts to protect them have similarly outsized effect.

It's not just that small garden birds are very common, in general they've co-evolved with predators similar to cats and have adapted to deal with that (for example by nesting at height, having large broods, etc). There's some exceptions, mostly when cats get introduced to islands with few similar natural predators, but as a general rule it's probably not the most pressing problem. Large birds like eagles reproduce slowly and don't have the instincts to avoid wind turbines which in theory makes wind farms a serious threat to those species.

Raptors are more likely to take the houscat than the other way around.