Cat Predation on Bats in an Urban Landscape of Eastern Europe: Twelve Years of Rescue-Centre Records

Predation by domestic cats is a recognised but poorly quantified threat to bats, and Eastern Europe is almost absent from the evidence. We analysed twelve years (2013–2024) of records of the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Centre, 41,910 bats of 15 species from 258 settlements, to estimate how often a cat was implicated in a find. Among the 4770 bats received in finds of four individuals or fewer, 1.59% (95% CI 1.27–1.99) were cat-related, with no trend over the years. The odds of a cat-related case were four to five times higher for Eptesicus serotinus and Vespertilio murinus than for Nyctalus noctula, and in the activity season seven to ten times higher for these two species and for Pipistrellus kuhlii. The male excess among E. serotinus victims matched the sex composition of the bats received, and age had no effect. Cat attacks were fatal for 54% of the bats concerned, but not more often than injuries of other origin. In one building in Kharkiv, by contrast, cats established inside killed 14.8% of the 1099 bats collected in a single winter, and predation fell to the background level after the cats were killed and the crevices sealed. Cat predation on urban bats thus operates in two regimes, a dispersed background at a stable low rate and localised roost-scale events governed by access, which call for different measures.