I just now came across this thread. I guess I’m late to the party. We’ve lived in our current house for 17-1/2 years and have always had indoor/outdoor cats.
We have turkeys (not often), barred owls, great horned owls, just about every hawk that is indigenous to NC, coyotes, foxes, deer, coons, woodchucks, skunks, Opossums, rabbits, even the very rare bear sighting, etc….right up here in N. High Point.
Your absent songbirds must have flown over to my place. We’ve got just about every songbird imaginable. A few days ago, I counted 27 cardinals (more than likely many more were out there), both male and female, out at our feeders.
We hear songbirds of various kinds all of the time. The most notable of course are the loud obnoxious common house wren but we have many others. We hear at least one new species we haven’t heard before every year.
Btw, with the exception of one cat we had from 2004 - 2015, our Maine Coon George, none of our cats leave our premises.
George, on the other hand, would leave our entire neighborhood just to fight the feral cats living in the wood’s surrounding our neighborhood. He would venture off more than a mile or so at times.