Why Sparrows Need Hedges

The Independent Newspaper and the House Sparrow

What follows has taken some research on my part to create a timeline on the Sparrow problem during the first few years of this 21st century. I've intertwined my own awareness of the sparrow dilemma around some of the major stories carried by The Independent during its worthwhile campaign on house sparrow decline. I have tried my best to summarise what some of the important articles have said.

The two timelines do not run parallel. The Independent and the rest of the world were far more aware of the sparrow crisis than I was. Indeed, I came to this subject rather late, as I innocently never realised the seriousness of the problem until the day I read about it - and with disbelief that there was a mystery about their disappearance.

Thirty odd years ago, I'd noticed house sparrows were declining like most other people, but it never really concerned me as I naturally thought society as a whole wanted this, why else would it so happily destroy what I considered natural sparrow habitat? Sparrows weren't actually being physically killed in suburbia; they just had their nesting and feeding options reduced, and so were not able to live and breed where they used to. Similarly today, people are trying to discourage the increased rat population.

Having sparrows nesting in the roof was seen by many as a nuisance, an infestation to be removed. I remember the first front garden being taken out in the road I grew up in during the late sixties. It left the front of that house looking naked. It wasn't long before others in the street saw the advantages of being able to park their cars off-road and not have to bother cutting the hedges every few months. Subsequently more front gardens were paved over. This craze occurred in many areas, and was the start of the sparrows' dramatic decline.

As a young naive amateur birdwatcher, house sparrows were always the birds that ate the food put out to attract other species, and they woke me up in the morning with their incesscent chirping and chirruping. Most people, and I include myself, considered them - rightly or wrongly - a bit of an annoyance. How I have changed.

One of the first occasions (I investigated) that The Independent newspaper championed the House sparrow's plight was in an article by their Environment Editor, Michael McCarthy, published in March 2000. Some reasons were put forward by sparrow expert, Dr Denis Summer-Smith, citing the Allee effect in house sparrows. (The American biologist Warder Allee suggests that when some social animal species fall below a certain level they stop breeding.)

Apparently in the same month they published another piece indicating the Government's first concern about sparrows, and during April they printed the results of a survey of 12 major cities outside London showing that the bird's disappearance from urban centres was widespread.

It was on May 16th 2000 that The Independent announced in an article by Michael McCarthy, it was offering a Ł5000 prize for the first convincing scientific evidence of why this bird is suddenly in trouble. It stated something like: The prize was for anyone who can find out why sparrows are in decline. It was being offered for a peer reviewed paper in a scientific journal, which in the opinion of their referees, the RSPB, the BTO, and Dr J Denis Summers-Smith, explained the house sparrow's recent decline, especially in built up areas. This really set the ball rolling apparently.

The May 2000 article further mentioned that: its purpose was to stimulate interest by the public and in scientific research. It even said non-scientists, will be considered for the award if their particular observation or theory proves to be the starting point for the final scientific explanation. It added: Scientists from the BTO and RSPB will not be barred from entering as they are among Britain's leading ornithological researchers. Well, they are the people in the know….

The offer was obviously welcomed by both the RSPB and BTO, as it would help stimulate research into the house sparrow problem. Since this announcement was made over four years ago, there have been over thirty articles in The Independent, highlighting various possible causes and survey results, and usually mentioning the tantalizing Ł5000 'prize' for anyone who can solve the mystery.

What an 'excellent' idea to have the two main judges - who I detect a bit of resentment, jealousy and rivalry between - deciding which of the other will be finally Honoured, receiving the worldwide recognition of 'solving' the UK's house sparrow problem! It ain't gonna happen!

For myself, I only became aware that people didn't realise it was habitat destruction during 2002 when I read an article by Tom Spender in my local paper, The Hendon & Finchley Times on June 27th 2002. I just assumed everyone understood that if you stop birds from nesting and removed their cover and food supply they're not going to stay around! It's not rocket science, as they say. I then found out about The Independent's concern during the latter part of 2002 and subsequently set about putting my own opinion on the matter in writing. This idiocy has got to stop I thought.

I wrote up my work in December, and with a few pictures sent it off to Nature Magazine in January 2003, hoping to put an end to this 'we don't know… it's a mystery .… nonsense about house sparrow loss. I had absolutely no idea of the crazy world I had unwittingly entered. I simply assumed that if someone knew an answer to a problem you could just let people know. Oh how wrong I have been….

Nature Magazine naturally rejected my article. I wasn't aware of the 'Scientific Paper' arrangement of doing things, with the abstract, detailing research, methodology, tables and acknowledgments etc. No problem, I reduced my original 3500+ words to less than 1500 and sent it back to them as a letter, and then also sent it to all and sundry. No one liked it or they just ignored it, though the BTO and RSPB showed a little interest. Too little as it turned out, nothing more was heard! Please see the reject section of my website, it's quite extensive!

There seems to be a world where unless something's demonstrated by some scientific formula it's not proven. Let's see:- If h = house sparrows, g = garden, n = nest site, p = privet hedge, l = lawn, i = insect, and s = seed. Then if:- (n + p + l + i + s) = g, and g = h, then - g = - h, and therefore:- no nest site, no privet hedge, no lawn, no insects, and no seeds equals no house sparrows! Simple….

Recently I discovered that in November 2000, The Independent announced there was to be an extensive scientific inquiry by the Government on the sparrow's plight. The Government were awarding an 18-month research contract worth Ł175,000 to a consortium led by the BTO and RSPB to examine why the house sparrow has virtually disappeared from many city centres.

In January 2001 they ran an article by Charlie Unwin about the RSPB proposing to add the house sparrow to their Red List of birds of concern. It mentions something like: how The Independent offered in May the previous year Ł5,000 to anyone who provided a scientifically authenticated explanation for the sparrow's decline in urban areas. It further mentions that: despite hundreds of letters suggesting possible reasons, the prize is still unclaimed.

Well unless these people have the trained discipline and skill to write a Scientific Paper, the 'prize' will always remain unclaimed! And will any scientist, who eventually writes a Paper pointing out the lack of suitable cover, food and nest sites being the reasons house sparrows have departed our cities, be daft to say 'oh, I got the idea from so and so.' I don't think so….

Further on, the January article mentions the cause of the sparrows' disappearance still mystifies experts, and quotes from the head of science at the RSPB, a Mr Gibons indicating that: it might be something mundane, like better weatherboarding on houses, which would prevent sparrows from nesting in roofs, or it might be more complicated, like an increase in atmospheric pollution.

My opinion is you can't get more mundane than a householder deciding to remove their privet hedge and front garden. Alone, it is a small almost insignificant act. However, taken together, with millions of other householders removing their hedges for car parking, our country has unwittingly removed thousands of miles of urban and suburban hedgerow. This was useful dense cover house sparrows used and relied on to enable it to forage for food, hide and socialise in. Our cities are speckled with isolated colonies of sparrows trapped in ever-threatened enclaves.

As for modern roofs not allowing sparrows' access to them, I hope everyone already universally understands this; it's so bloody obvious. To jump species for a while, take a look at these two photographs of what some dunderhead did last year. Who is writing the Scientific Paper on: 'Homo sapiens sapiens' immense cruelty and stupidity' when it comes to preventing this sort of insensitive action?

One late August, I was shocked to see this cack-handed 'repair' to the soffit board of this house in London. It was done to discourage Swifts from using the roof as a roost. It was effective; the swifts were seen circling in anger the weekend it was done - I only hope the cruel idiot that did it, made sure there were no swifts trapped in the roof. Next year the swifts were not so noticeable in the street where this destructive action had taken place.

Job complete! Less than a year after the original sin, no swifts or bats can ever use this roof space again, the wood has been completely removed and replaced with this plastic soffit board with small insect-proof air vents all the way round. Yes, this keeps the house free from wildlife, but at what cost to the environment and biodiversity of the city? People should be honoured to have swifts in their roof.

It’s astounding, that while this spectacular little bird travels thousands of miles back and forth across the globe, utilising millions of years of evolutional instinct, and usefully eats insects above the skies of London, some pratt with nails, a hammer and two brain cells can eradicate this marvel in a matter of minutes.

Due to house sparrows' sedentary manner, they spread slowly through any new urbanised area, colonising it as their families expand. This was possible when our houses consisted of fancy wooded eaves with ill-fitting soffit boards on our roofs, and the houses had large gardens front and back. Trees, shrubs, hedges and lawns were a natural and expected addition to homes in our sprawling network of roads and estates built across this country during the past 150 years. When we all shared our world with horses, stables too were everywhere. This has changed.

We are now inheriting a fragmented suburban landscape in so many cities as the property developers carve up and change what we had. From the largest building sites like the London Docklands scheme to the smallest projects, like Mr Average, buying his council house and deciding to remove his front garden; sustained destruction of what we and the house sparrows enjoyed, is continuing unchecked.

Sparrows need hedges, adequate cover is so important, and this is disappearing. Modern buildings do not have the intricate nooks and crannies between the roof and walls like older buildings had, and birds and bats are unlikely to ever find a way in to re-tiled roofs of existing houses.

At the end of many sparrow related articles in The Independent over the years, it often reminds us that: The Independent is still offering Ł5,000 for the first Scientific Paper explaining the house sparrow's decline in towns and cities. It says it welcomes comments from readers at: Save The Sparrow, The Independent, Independent House, 191 Marsh Wall, London E14 9RS. E-mail: letters@independent.co.uk.

In an article by Michael McCarthy on10th March 2003, he refers to: it being three years since the prize was offered, and it not been awarded, as there hasn't been any serious contenders - but the problem has become clearer, and the hunt for solutions is narrowing. The article also mentions Ms Rosie Cleary, the BTO House Sparrow Officer, (often referred to the as the Sparrow Tsar) indicating that the way our houses are constructed has affected sparrows because they cannot get into roof spaces. It really is a pity Nature Magazine rejected the article I sent to them in January 2003 in which all this and the lack of hedges was mentioned! But then I'm not a scientist and so my observation, research, revelation and writings apparently mean nothing….

I wrote to Michael McCarthy in June 2003 and kindly received a telephone call in July where we discussed my ideas and he basically dismissed them hinting at: then why are there now no sparrows in the Royal Parks where there are lots of hedges? (A bang my head against a wall moment - all my observations and writing meant nothing!)

During that Summer I visited several of London's Royal Parks and wrote up another article giving my reasons why I thought the sparrows were no longer there. (Briefly, there are few buildings in these parks and fewer hedges. Most of the sparrows that were there years ago came in from outside, but the places where they nested are no longer available. I did hear and see one male house sparrow near the Peter Pan statue though.)

I sent this off in September 2003, and a few photographs in October highlighting house and garden demolition - and heard nothing. A phone message left in December also drew no response, as did neither letters or emails to Mr. McCarthy, and the paper's Editor during the first half of 2004, including an article about my experience at the Defra House Sparrow Conference in February.

It has been a disgraceful catalogue of non-communication from The Independent to every way I have tried to contact them for over 14 months! It made me wonder if their concern shown about house sparrows really existed. So you can imagine my utter surprise when I received a telephone call from Michael McCarthy in October this year (2004) telling me there was to be an article published next day about house sparrows due to be taken off the General License list in January 2005, giving them Legal protection against being killed off as pests.

I hurriedly sent a letter to the paper the next day after reading the article and luckily had it published the following week. At least it gave my thoughts a national airing.

The Independent may continue saying no one has won their 'prize' for having a Scientific Paper published giving the reason for house sparrow decline. However, just because it's not been written in that format, doesn't mean to say the reason for house sparrow decline hasn't been explained in print!

I wonder who at this moment is writing the Scientific Paper? Describing the methodology of routing out a hedge and how to block up the holes under roof tiles, or maybe how to transform a beautiful traditional garden into a stone and pebble disaster? And then tabulating all the results and plotting the ratio of: 'area of a block-paved front garden' against, 'decline of sparrows naturally feeding' onto a nicely coloured graph!

The Independent's offer of Ł5000 may not have helped one sparrow one jot from destruction, but it might have got more people thinking about the problem. If The Independent has received hundreds of letters on the subject over the years, has anyone bothered to tabulate the information contained within them? Surely if many people are indicating certain problems or ideas repeatedly, these could be published and looked into - or finally dismissed?

Why the simple notion of removing nest sites, food sources and cover being solely responsible for sparrow decline, cannot be accepted by those theoretically in charge of the 'Nation's Bird Flocks' (the words Protection and Trust in the names of two such prestigious organisations suggests this) I cannot comprehend. Though it might be difficult to generate huge Government research grants if you asked for money to study the behavioural practices of the 'Driveway Cowboys.'

These groups of unskilled ba****ds descend on a suburban front garden like locust. Ripping out hedges, shrubs, trees, lawns and flower beds with a passion before putting down the hardcore, sand and block or crazy paving over the entire lot. They do this unashamedly, often promoting their 'profession' with an advertising board.

Once they have finished their crime, usually leaving no green areas at all, the homeowner can park their big German car and Japanese 4x4 with ease. There goes the Nation's balance of payments, and no doubt the Chancellor missed out on the cash payment to the cowboys too. If I sound angry it's because I am. These people should be licensed and planning permission sought before altering the very essence of suburbia and removing another part of our Nation's important hedgerow.

It does give me a certain satisfaction to see grass and plants pushing their way up through many of these hastily laid driveways. The cowboys cutting costs by not using a plastic membrane underneath or having too much dirt mixed in the sand between the blocks. Better still, pools of water forming as no attention to drainage being taken, allowing dirt to accumulate and moss to grow. Nature will always fight back!

To read in The Independent on February 21st 2004, the day after the Defra National Sparrow Conference in London, in a story by Steve Connor their Science Editor, that the decline of the British sparrow is linked to a growth in tidy gardens was depressing. Tidy is such a soft ineffective word to use in place of destruction and eradication, better terms to describe gardens that have lost house sparrows.

The story referred to the joint talk given at the Sparrow Conference by Richard Bland and John Tully, carrying out research for the British Trust for Ornithology, noticing that there are more sparrow colonies on traditional council estates than amongst private housing. I was at the conference and heard these two speeches and saw the photographs. It all made perfect sense to me and was the most accurate observation I heard about house sparrow decline that day. (And more than a year after I wrote to Nature Magazine highlighting this very fact, and six months after I wrote to the BTO and RSPB.)

Yet even then it was put down to affluence and tidiness. No, it's 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 generally are not allowed to - and why spend money on something that isn't yours anyway, even if they could afford to? In my experience those still living in nice traditional houses on council estates that haven't bought their properties are too poor to do so; either because they are too young, too old or have large families, or sadly too much into alcohol or drugs.

This Independent article further mentioned a Dr Rob Robinson of the BTO indicating that: a tidy garden devoid of weedy patches and designed for human comfort than nature is not good for either type of food sparrows need. If they know there is poor foraging habitat in gardens and nesting opportunities are impossible in new roofs, then that's it! Fewer house sparrows! So what the hell are people still looking for? What on Earth do they expect to find specifically killing sparrows while most other garden birds are doing okay?

All the other reasons like sparrowhawk and cat predation etc. will of course do there tiny bit, but don't blame them and magpies for re-roofing houses or ripping out the hedges and front gardens. As I write this in December, I've got 9 greenfinch 5 chaffinch, 2 Jays, 2 nuthatches, umpteen coal tits, blue tits and great tits all competing for nuts and seeds from the feeders hanging outside the front of my flat.

Sitting in the bare sycamore tree behind, itself being scoured by a gathering of gold crests and longtailed tits, are a pair of smug magpies, content in knowing their food supply for the spring is well assured…. There is plenty for everyone, yet there are few hedges out the front and the roof is impenetrable. I don't expect to see house sparrows here, like I wouldn't expect a kingfisher to zip by.

Finally, to paraphrase what the great environmentalist Dr. Max Nicholson indicated in an article in The Independent on July 3rd 2000, about house sparrows being susceptible to disturbance and the psyche of sparrows possibly being an important factor of their existence affecting their breeding success if their numbers fall: some things cannot be measured in a scientific way, but a lot of things that cannot be measured are real.

Incidentally, it was Mr Nicholson at the age of 21 who counted the house sparrows in London's Kensington Gardens in November 1925, calculating 2,603 of them. This count was repeated in December 1948, (885 birds); in November 1966 (642); in November 1975 (544); and in February 1995 (46). I wasn't actually looking for sparrows in Kensington Gardens, but in August 2003, but I saw (1).

At least The Independent newspaper has returned frequently to the subject of house sparrows; but unless action is taken by the media in announcing habitat destruction is driving the sparrow (and starling & hedgehogs) away from our urban and suburban areas, nothing will halt the decline. Plenty of research is taking place because: never before has so much research been done by so many who've understood so few of the real reasons for house sparrow decline.