Sparrows Need Hedges

Recollections of some House Sparrow Anecdotes

This is an account of a chance meeting I had with a dear old man I met in Burnt Oak, London just over four years ago. Burnt Oak is an area dominated by a large sprawling council housing estate, known as the Watling, built on farmland during the 1940s to house those bombed out of London's East End.

As a decorator with Barnet council, I was sent there to do some painting at a house in a road I'd never visited before. One day during lunch, I was throwing bits of a cheese sandwich towards the house sparrows when an elderly man walking his dog approached my van and we started talking about sparrows.

At the time I didn't realise how important Arthur's recollections of the newly built estate were. They were interesting, but now I realise his stories were exceptional and very significant regarding house sparrows.

After the war, he married and wanted to move back to Edgware. Arthur recalled how the council told him to walk around the new estate and choose a house he liked and put his name down. He did and had lived there since. What an amazing period to live in, to be able to choose a three-bedroom house at a reasonable rent, I wish it were that easy to get a home nowadays.

He said he knew the area as farmland when a boy, and how it had been totally transformed when he saw it years later. He told me there was still a lot of building work taking place at various locations, with teams of craftsmen moving from street to street, bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters, plumbers and roofers. He also said there were gardeners seeding lawns and planting hedges. Apparently the whole estate was typical of its time, using privet hedges as borders around the properties.

Arthur's corner house was relatively near the middle of the new estate, and as he had an interest in birds, he recalled how the first ones seen in the area were thrushes, robins, blackbirds and tits, and how house sparrows were first noted at the edges of the estate, taking up residence from one house to another, spreading to suitable adjacent properties when their colonies expanded.

He said it was several years before they finally spread to the centre of the Watling and eventually nested in his own roof. By then many fruit trees, the hedges and flowerbeds were well established, with gardens looking like they should and not building sites. Not everyone welcomed the sparrows, but the wood-clad houses provided many gaps for the birds to find nesting sites. He mentioned how the hard winter of 62/63 knocked their numbers back, but said it only took a few years for them to fully recover.

I spoke to Arthur on several occasions whenever I worked in the area, and when I suggested to him once how there were few sparrows about in North Finchley, London, where I lived at the time, he reminded me how particular birds usually only live where their habitat was. He said you wouldn't expect to find a woodpecker on a sea cliff, a sea eagle in Trafalgar Square or a kingfisher in your average back garden.

He stressed that if sparrows were not around it might be because their habitat was not there anymore. He'd also noticed a steady decline of house sparrows locally over the years, although he still had them nesting in his own roof and feeding in his garden.

The last time I met Arthur was three years ago. I told him I thought it was the loss of front gardens and hedges that must be responsible for sparrow decline. He informed me how those living in his roof seemed to belong to a smaller group than previously. I suggested the Conservative policy of Right-to-Buy introduced in 1980 had probably caused the loss of sparrow colonies around Burnt Oak, as people were able to remove their front gardens once they became home owners.

Arthur mentioned he would have brought his own home if he could, but with having to retire early through injury before Right-to-Buy came in, and with no living relatives, he never had the money to purchase his house. He agreed the leafy nature of the estate had changed significantly over time with too many front gardens removed, including those of his immediate neighbours.

I never saw Arthur again, for when I drove past his house and saw different people going in one day, I enquired to discover he'd died two months earlier and the house was subsequently re-let. This was very sad for me and I wish I'd made the effort to know him better as he was very kind, droll and an interesting source of local history.

Worse was to come years later. Where he lived, his large L-shaped beautiful hedged front garden on the corner has completely gone. Three cars are usually parked where his party of eclectic gnomes used to sit on the lawn around the small pond he'd constructed. Recently I've been able to sit in my van and eat my lunch in the same place I had four years earlier. It struck me that three things had changed radically since.

One, my van was different; being the second new one I've had since I first met Arthur. Two, Arthur had died and his front garden totally eradicated, giving a bare appearance to the street corner, and extending the expanse of concreting up both roads. And three, the house sparrows were no longer nesting in his roof, even though the broken roof tile near the gutter has not changed, and the gaps in the wooden cladding are still visible. There are still house sparrows further up the road, the only ones I know of nearby - in a house with its original hedge border and front garden.

It's been my mission since to try and get something done to reverse the decline of the house sparrow by highlighting the effects selfish destruction of its habitat is having on the poor bird. My attempts to inform those who say they care have been met with remarkable indifference.

Why do people fail to understand that habitat loss is the key reason why house sparrows are disappearing? Habitat is habitat. Remove it and you're left with nothing. Lack of food and nest sites are symptoms of suitable habitat loss, not the initial causes of the sparrows' problems.

I will keep trying to explain this simple truth until it is commonly accepted. Only then can appropriate actions be taken to try and restore the loss of house sparrow habitat.