Cat affair may spell trouble for other species

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Silicon Valley is booming, and longtime residents are being driven out everywhere. But only in Shoreline Park are the newcomers eating the natives.

A handful of burrowing owls live in this 750-acre wildlife and recreation area, deep in the grass. As the breeding season begins, they are among perhaps 50 left in Silicon Valley.

Death strikes hard at Shoreline. The remains of an owl — a leg, a wing, a few scattered feathers — were found here in 2015, shortly after a feral cat was seen stalking it. Another owl was discovered dead near its burrow, and a third disappeared that year and was presumed killed. That was fully half the owls nesting in the park.

Environmentalists have been alarmed for a long time about the number of cats at Shoreline, but they could not determine where they were coming from. Gradually, public records requests and old-fashioned snooping uncovered a trail. It led into the everexpanding empire of Google.

Google never set out to threaten biodiversity in its front yard, of course. At Google, it is not so much that workers do not like birds as it is that they really love cats. There is an employee group called GCat Rescue that traps the cats around the Googleplex. Kittens and friendly adults are put up for adoption. Lessfriendly adult cats are neutered and released.

Google is famous for feeding its employees well, and the cats are no different. Every night, all night, dinner is served from catfeeding stations. The cat community calls this approach “colony care.”

“Neutering and colony care,” GCat Rescue maintains, “also stop nuisance behaviors like fighting, screaming, spraying, roaming, hunting, etc.” The cats that are released are implanted with tracking chips, and an ear is notched so they can be identified. GCat’s website says it has placed 148 cats for adoption. It does not say how many have been released around the company’s campus.

Emails to GCat Rescue at meow@google.com were not answered. A Google spokeswoman said the GCat group was made up of fewer than 10 people, but otherwise declined to discuss it.

Environmental groups said Google was generally an excellent partner and had made aggressive efforts to support the burrowing owls at Moffett Field, its leased property a few miles south of the Googleplex, but was consistently unhelpful on the cat issue.

“They told us it was something their employees were doing and they couldn’t interfere,” said Eileen McLaughlin, a board member with a group trying to protect and expand the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. She and the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society asked Google to remove the cat feeding stations in 2012.

Cats have stalked birds forever, but in Shoreline Park, a final victory is at hand.

The number of cat sightings there last year was 318, according to the city of Mountain View’s official count. And 2017 was the first time in 20 years of recordkeeping that no owl fledglings were observed in the park. As recently as 2011, there were 10.

“We lose the owls, we lose something else next, and then something else,” McLaughlin said. “We need biodiversity.”