Crime scene

My neighbour is having her garden landscaped at the moment and over recent weeks it's been heavy duty stuff, with a JCB levelling out and knocking down. They've also had the chainsaw out and cleared most of the old apple trees, leaving one to here and there.

One survivor is an ivy-covered hazel that was to close to the boundary fence for felling and had to suffer radical surgery instead. Then a night or two ago the wind blew and one of its main limbs snapped off and dropped into our garden.
Or would have done if the trailing ivy didn't keep it in its grip. I had to get a saw out and cut it free.
Looking at closely at it, the mass of entangled ivy stems completely encase the hazel limb, which was dead and beginning to rot. In my picture there's two or three times as much of the light ivy wood as there is darker hazel.
That limb was carrying a lot of weight. Which made me think about the relationship between ivy and its host tree once again. A friend of mine is convinced that ivy kills trees and looking at the way the ivy had this hazel held it's really easy to see it as one strangling the life out of the other.My friend would look at this picture as evidence of murder committed. But it's really more about ivy flourishing on trees that are already on the last lap.
The RHS says of ivy "its presence on the trunk (of a tree) is not damaging and where it grows into the crowns this is usually only because the tree sare already in decline or diseased and slowly dying". An innocent bystander then and guilty of no 'crime'. 

Near miss

I live in a house with cats, but probably wouldn't choose to if I was living alone. My other half likes them, so I share my living space with three at the moment.
It creates a dilemma. If I feed the birds in my garden, am I exposing them to an unnecessary degree of risk? Predation by a sparrowhawk is one thing, but being killed by a bored cat is quite another.
On balance though I think the benefit that comes from a reliable source of food through the winter outweighs occasional losses to one of our moggies. And our collection of cats are on the whole elderly and too slow for bird-catching.
My partner's latest cat acquisition arrived as a kitten last winter. An unwanted pet, it decided we were a better bet than its first owner.
He's now got his own bed, name (Boris) and territory. He's also at that time of life when hunting is a full-time occupation.
This morning we were enjoying a cup of tea in bed when there was a squawk from downstairs. As I went down, Boris was coming up - with a mouthful of downy feathers.
At the bottom of the stairs more feathers and bird droppings. I searched the area for a dead bird, but then heard clucking in the kitchen.
Our dog was looking at a male blackbird that was sitting on top of our microwave.The bird had lost a couple of tail feathers, but otherwise looked relatively unscathed.
When I opened the kitchen door the blackbird flew out, relieved to have made it back into the garden alive. I later saw it feeding, but don't rate its chances of long-term survival.
What toll do wild populations of birds and mammals suffer at the paws and claws of bored domestic cats? Not sure if anyone can say with any degree of accuracy, but on the whole cats and wildlife gardens really don't mix.