Cats kill 10,000 times as many birds as wind turbines

I didn't watch the Trump-Biden debate last night - couldn't face it - but apparently one of the few exchanges that actually elicited a laugh from the audience was when Mr. Trump burst out, "I know more about wind than you do. It's extremely expensive, kills all the birds".

Setting aside the fact that he came across sounding like a seven-year old, this is obviously not true. For one, wind power is now substantially cheaper than fossil fuels pretty much everywhere. And secondly, the bird-killing capacity of wind turbines has been hugely overblown(!), and pales in comparison with other bird killers like pwer lines (130 times as many as wind turbines), poison (300 times), vehicle collisions (900 times), building collisions (2,500 times), and, the No. 1 culprit, cats (over 10,000 times as many). 

These numbers are based on figures from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, so I have no reason to disbelieve them, but the number of 2.4 billion bird deaths, in the USA alone, at the hands (paws) of cats boggled my mind a bit. Let's think about this. There are 128 million households in the United States, and there are an estimated 95.6 million cats living in those households (some of which host more than one cat). This suggests that each cat kills on average about 25 birds a year. This could be possible (just). But consider also that about 70% of American cats are indoor-only cats that never get to venture outside (a mind-boggling statistic all on its own), the 29 million or so that do go outdoors must be responsible for killing about 84 birds each. Each year. If we take out those cats that are obese, very old or very young, or just plain lazy and incapable of catching a bird or a mouse or anything at all - and I have no stats on this, but from my anecdotal experience I think it is substantial - then the numbers of bird deaths per cat just keep going up, and we are looking at well over hundred per cat, probably more than one a day during the summer season.

My point is that the 2.4 billion bird deaths due to American cats just seems really improbable. I don't deny that cats do kill birds, and some cats kill many birds, and I understand that this is a problem. I just can't believe it's THAT big a problem. Looking at this another way though, there are about 60,000 wind turbines in the USA at the moment, which, if they kill a total of 234,000 birds a year, means under 4 per turbine, compared to over a hundred a year per cat. "Killing all the birds", Mr. Trump?