Why Sparrows Need Hedges

So, what are the RSPB and BTO doing about House Sparrows then?

Apparently a lot. Research, research, research seems to be the order of the day. While it's all very laudable to carry out additional research into any subject; with regards house sparrows - whose plight is urgent - personally I feel too much study is being done looking for the wrong solutions to the wrong questions! Controversial? - I'll say….

Recently I was informed of another study by the RSPB where they propose to identify approximately 100 house sparrow colonies within the Greater London area. They are going to provide one group of colonies with supplementary food throughout the year, another group with protein-rich food during the breeding season only, and a third group with no supplementary food at all; to see - well I'm not quite certain? This was described as an exciting new project in the e-mail that was sent to me in July this year.

I'm sure any creature would benefit from an extra food supply, yet house sparrows have managed to feed themselves without help for millions of years. I think it might be better to observe where existing sparrows are currently living and getting their food from now, and ensure this supply is not unnecessarily threatened - by reckless garden and hedge removal perhaps...?

The house sparrows I watched earlier this year (2004) in parts of Burnt Oak, London seemed as happy as any I have watched at any time through my life. There were plenty of young sparrows, or chrips as I discovered in an old textbook, pestering their parents, following them in a noisy crowd. They all made use of the extensive privet hedging in the area, and in the autumn large gatherings took place in the magnificent hawthorn hedge bordering the local allotments.

Bird tables aside, if there are no suitable plants for seeds or places to find insects, what do people expect house sparrows to feed on in much of our now suburban concreted wastelands? If young sparrows are starving through lack of food, then the places where food was traditionally found must be disappearing? Because the BTO and RSPB are seen to be doing something, people anticipate that an answer to sparrow decline will soon be found. At the present rate, I don't hold out much hope.

Various results from surveys and reports have already been published over the years like the British Trust for Ornithology's Research Report 290, and the GLA's London Biodiversity Partnership's Where Have All Our Sparrows Gone? survey 2002, published on January 14th 2003. This latter survey came with a varied-green shaded map, indicating the percentages of London's homes where sparrows were reported.

I find percentages of birds in gardens maddening and deceptive. For instance, to be informed by this GLA survey that 62% of London Borough of Barnet's homes that reported sparrows have an average of 4.36 birds each is misleading. Data on birds in gardens must be skewed somewhat, as people who care enough to count birds, most probably put food out to attract them in the first place. This result was only from 442 responses in a borough with over 100,000 households!

To get a more accurate picture of any area, you would also need to know what visits the gardens of disinterested people - something almost impossible to do. Confusion between the dunnock and sparrow also cannot be discounted. Having witnessed many occasions of people confusing the two, I'm sure the recent success of the dunnock has unwittingly buoyed up house sparrow sightings.

Either people have sparrows in the vicinity of their homes or they don't. You cannot spread out the statistics to give everyone a fraction of a sparrow or the misconception is that we each have something of a sparrow, whereas the reality is different. Many houses and gardens have none - and are probably incapable of ever supporting house sparrows again due to the changes made to the roof and garden.

Surely it would be better to study what the local habitat is like around houses that still have sparrows and compare this with what is around homes that don't. I suggest the recording of house sparrow numbers is only useful if the type of habitat they occupy is also noted alongside their sighting. I believe the BTO have done this in some of their projects.

The joint talk at the Defra Sparrow Conference in London last February, given by Richard Bland and John Tully, carrying out research for the BTO, noticing there are more sparrow colonies on traditional council estates than amongst private housing, made perfect sense to me and was the most accurate observation I heard about house sparrow decline that day. Yet this observation was wrongly attributed to affluence and tidiness! It's actually due to the fact that private homeowners remove their front gardens and build patio and decking in their back gardens because they can, while council tenant's are not allowed to. Correct interpretation of data is as important as it's collection.

On the subject of surveys, personally I have trouble with the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch, in that it asks people to watch for just one hour over the third weekend in January what birds they see. One hour is nothing, do I choose the hour when the goldcrests makes an appearance, or later in the day when the goldfinches visit?

I know that during a twenty-four hour period I will see a range of different birds. From the dawn chorus in the morning to the owl hooting at night, various birds will visit the patch of garden at the back of my flat. The robin, blackbird, wren, starling, pigeon et al will always make an appearance in almost any hour I choose, whereas the small flock of greenfinches, the jay, green woodpecker and tawny owl select their own appointment time when to arrive! In addition, they may not stay that long as they continue their daily large foraging circuit. To choose just one hour potentially misses so many of the scarcer species.

I don't know if the one hour was chosen to dumb the whole process down, imagining people couldn't cope with more than that, but if I were running the scheme knowing I had over four hundred thousand willing volunteers across the country prepared to watch and record birds, I would ask them to record - at any convenient time during the whole appointed weekend - all the species seen and heard visiting their location.

The result would be that rather than just knowing between the hour of 2-3 p.m. on the Sunday in location X, it had a robin, blue tit and blackbird - big deal, one could almost guess that anywhere - you would know that location X is visited during the weekend by spotted woodpecker, nuthatch, gold crest, tree creeper and kestrel etc., as well as all the usual suspects. A brief description of the location, with plants and food available would also be useful - just a tick box saying ‘garden' means little.

Addendum

Remarkably, in my local newspaper last week there was a story about the new RSPB house sparrow project, which I mentioned at the beginning of this article, saying that 75 sparrow colonies across Greater London are to be studied over the next few years and one of the colonies is in my borough, the London Borough of Barnet. The story indicates there is still some big unknown cause for house sparrow decline! I would suggest it might be either stubbornness or stupidity….

This is now getting spooky; I received today a request from the RSPB, as I am a member, to send a donation to help with their new four-year London House Sparrow Project. It details how they will be monitoring 75 house sparrow colonies across the Greater London area, seeing if lack of suitable food in summer is a major factor in young sparrow survival, and whether lack of food is causing the death of sparrows in winter. It says Ł250,000 is needed to do this research, enabling three full-time researches to monitor and collect data for the four years, provide nestboxes and food and specialist equipment to study sparrow populations.

The request from the RSPB London Project Manager, Paul Forecast, lists several reasons why sparrows may be in decline - but lack of cover is not listed! I truly despair. Thank goodness this website is a shinning beacon in a sea unawareness. The information the RSPB supplied uses words and phrases like urgent and before it's too late, yet talks about the four-year study! How much more urban and suburban hedgerow will be removed in the next four years? I know of three more front gardens taken out locally in the past two weeks!

Give sparrows the cover, nesting places and feeding areas they need and let them get on with it. Take those away and the sparrows will go - as they have done from so many districts. The RSPB often runs worthy campaigns to raise funds to save areas of unique habitat for particular bird species. What's really needed with sparrows is an awareness campaign to change the way we perceive them.

The mistaken myth that the house sparrow is some amazing adaptable bird that will live anywhere is misguided. It also has specific preferences and needs. These are being taken away rapidly, and so the sparrow struggles. Lack of food is important, but it's the reason why it has lost access to its usual food supply that's important, and it's this that should be studied.

Given time, the bird can adapt to many different situations, but it's well-known social and sedentary behaviour means it's more difficult for the bird to relocate quickly if its habitat is disturbed or it's forced from its home. It really doesn't like sudden change. Who does? If I became homeless, I'd sleep in a shop doorway; it doesn't mean I'd prefer that to a warm bed in a house!

They are called house sparrows for a reason. The answer is in the name we gave them. They like to associate with our dwellings and habitation. It's we humans that are changing the way, and how we live. We are actively shunning one of our closest companions on this planet. Like the domestic cat and dog, we have a long and close relationship with house sparrows. We are the ones breaking that unwritten symbiotic contract.