Rebalancing an Ecosystem

When we bought our house in Aiken three years ago there were bunny rabbits, lots of lizards, birds, and other critters. When we let our cats outside, they soon began hunting and killing whatever they could catch (bringing many a live critter into the house so they could chase the poor creature without it having any real chance of escaping unless one of us humans were around to save and release it).

I have always been allergic to mosquitoes and often joke about how they can smell me from ten miles away. The whole time that we lived in SC we couldn’t figure out where all the mosquitoes in our yard were coming from. We were more than a mile from any natural water source. Our swimming pool was meticulously maintained by my hubby, I kept Dunks in our rain barrel and any other places in our yard that might possibly hold water. I couldn’t see standing water in any of our neighbors’ yards, so I was stumped.

Our kitties are now comfortably lodged in our apartment in Chattanooga, much to their aggravation at not being allowed outside now. Anyhow, we are getting our house ready to sell, so we’ve been driving back every weekend to work on it. We’ve noticed a resurgence in the lizard population the past couple of weeks. This past weekend, however, we also noticed we weren’t being eaten alive by mosquitoes! Our cats had disrupted the ecosystem that had evolved in our yard over the past 70 years that the house has stood there!

So for all the pests that cats dispatch, there are plenty of others allowed to thrive in the absence of their natural predators!