This honestly sincere dedication goes out to the Rancho Viejo cat eradication committee: “Bye Bye Birdie,” from the Broadway musical of the same name.

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Residents of the little golfing town north of Brownsville created a Cat Control Committee to address a perceived overabundance of the little monsters. It appears they intend to address their furry feline foes with extreme prejudice, as they say in military parlance.

Committee members should be aware of a recent Associated Press article about a similar operation in Australia, which once again reminds us of unintended consequences of ill-thought-out plans.

The Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service wanted to do something to benefit the birds of Macquarie Island, which sits between Australia and Antarctica. It’s a famous nesting site for several species of birds, some of them threatened or endangered. Those bedevilled Tasmanians decided to eradicate all the wild cats on the island, since they hunted and sometimes caught the beloved birds and ate their eggs and babies.

As a result of the cat removal efforts, Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division and others wrote in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, “there has been widespread ecosystem devastation and decades of conservation effort compromised.”

It seems that in killing off the cats, they removed the predators not only for the birds, but also for rabbits, mice and rats. Without natural population controls the other critters multiplied like — well, rabbits, and eventually ate up most of the foliage on the island that provided nesting material and habitat for grubs and other morsels that supported our feathered friends.

Bye-bye birdies.

“The lessons for conservation agencies globally is that interventions should be comprehensive, and include risk assessments to explicitly consider and plan for indirect effects, or face substantial subsequent costs,” Bergstrom said, The AP reported.

So did the cat killers learn their lesson? As they say in Spanish, “Hasta la pregunta es necia” — the very question is silly.

The traditional bureaucratic response is that if something doesn’t work, just do the same thing again but in a much bigger way. That’s just what’s planned for Macquarie.

“What was wrong was that the rabbits were not eradicated at the same time as the cats.” said Mick Clout, a University of Auckland professor and member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Birds Australia.

The Tasmanian parks service plans to return in 2010 with a massive new eradication program for the rabbits and rodents, the AP reports. They will start by dropping poisoned food pellets, then follow up by storming the island and shooting and trapping all the rabbits they can, and finally fumigating the entire island to complete the crittercide.

It’s likely, of course, that some of the poison will make its way into the surrounding water and possibly affect fish, crabs and other sea life.

At this point we should note that they birds they’re trying to help include all four classes of albatrosses, which have had a hard time surviving in recent years. We also offer a reminder of what killed off the Texas horned lizard. We started poisoning ants, the lizards ate the ants and were themselves poisoned, and now we have almost no horny toads and the ants continue to spread.

So it’s safe to assume that as poisoned animals start to decompose they’ll get eaten by various sub-critters and some birds will eat those sub-critters. Shorebirds will eat fish, squid and other stuff that’s similarly poisoned. Guess what will happen to the birds?

And that’s even before they breathe the fumigated air that’s planned for the final extermination.

This should give pause to Rancho Viejo’s committee members. While they look for ways to control the cats, they ought to remember that the cats control mice, rats, opossums and no telling what other pests are scurrying around the resacas and fertilizer sheds in their neighorhoods.

Addressing their little cat problem just might create even bigger, nastier problems instead. Are they ready for the consequences of their actions?