The owner of any cat caught outdoors would be fined five hundred euros, or about five hundred and fifty dollars any cat that injured or killed a crested lark could incur a penalty of fifty thousand euros. “From now until August 31,” it declared, “the free roaming of cats is to be prevented by their owners in the area covered by this decree.” The rule would take effect in just three days, not only in the new subdivision but also in Tredwell’s neighborhood, and recur each spring until 2025. “You feel extra close to them.” On page 12, after flipping past items about an asparagus festival, a classical concert, and a local soccer team, Tredwell found a government announcement. “The kids go off to university, and you still have the pets,” she said. Now that her daughters are grown, she spends a lot of time alone with Mimi and Fluffy. In May, 2022, Tredwell picked up a copy of the weekly town bulletin, the Walldorfer Rundschau. “If we want to be successful, we need a new strategy,” he remembers telling them. Lepp had taken a job there, as an ecologist, and some government lawyers reached out to him. “It was too absurd.” Fischer’s calls for stronger protections went over better with officials who worked in Karlsruhe, for the state government. “No one took it seriously,” Walldorf’s mayor, Matthias Renschler, told me. But the town government was not about to ban outdoor cats. Authorities also culled magpies and crows, two bird species that thrive in suburban spaces and prey on nests. “They were shooting the foxes,” she told me. By 2022, only two crested-lark pairs could be found breeding in the area. Still, he said, his team saw cats stalking crested-lark territories-in one case, on the same day that eggs disappeared from a nest. He told me that he pleaded with residents, both in letters and in person, to keep their cats indoors while the larks were breeding. A community of sixteen thousand people-home to the software giant SAP and one of the richest towns in Germany-was now spending more than eighty thousand euros a year to protect a small number of birds.Īs families moved into the subdivision, Fischer worried about predators that might harm the larks. The town set aside some nearby fields as lark habitat, but the birds stayed put, so Walldorf fenced in the vacant lots where the birds were nesting in the weeds. “The population of this species will be on the brink of extinction, if protective measures aren’t taken in the coming years,” Fischer warned in a 2016 report. When he surveyed the site, in 20, he estimated that seven to ten pairs, or about one-eighth of the crested larks in the state, were breeding there. Walldorf was required to monitor locally threatened species, so it hired Hans-Joachim Fischer, a biologist who worked for an environmental-planning company. In 2014, bulldozers broke ground on a new subdivision behind a grocery store, exposing sandy soil that grew weeds and attracted more crested larks. He went looking for the birds often enough that some of them seemed to recognize him, too. Lepp could tell the crested lark apart from a skylark or a wood lark by the spiked feathers on its head, as well as by its slightly longer bill, shorter tail, and rounder wings. Near Tredwell’s apartment, he found a single male in a field, belting out whistles, tremolos, and double notes. Crested larks are not globally endangered-tens of millions are estimated to live in Europe, and hundreds of millions worldwide-but, in a two-year survey of the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Walldorf is situated, Lepp counted only about sixty breeding pairs. “If they catch a mouse,” Tredwell told me, “it’s just for fun.”Īround that time, a young ornithologist named Tobias Lepp passed through the area while looking for his favorite species, the crested lark. Their cozy apartment, in a prosperous German town called Walldorf, was filling up Tredwell installed a cat flap on the balcony, to encourage Mimi and Fluffy to explore outdoors in “a natural way.” They slept for hours on warm stones beneath the balcony, and occasionally hunted critters in the garden. The children named the kitten Mimi and quarrelled so much over holding her that, after a few months, Tredwell also rescued Fluffy, a cuddly white tom with two Rorschach-style blots on his back. 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. “I wanted the kids to grow up with pets, to learn how to treat animals right,” she told me. Regine Tredwell decided to become a cat owner in 2009, shortly after she divorced the father of her two young daughters.
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