Why Sparrows Need Hedges

Some Further Thoughts On House Sparrows

Most of the local sparrow colonies I’m acquainted with do not seem capable of expansion even though the areas immediately around them have no sparrows. The sparrows enjoy plenty of cover where they live, with nooks and crannies in the houses they frequent, but the houses nearby where there are no sparrows are typically devoid of cover and as a rule the roof tiles are not original and the front gardens removed. So many front gardens have been removed in some areas I’m surprised this in itself has not attracted the attention of the media as the physical character of many districts have changed.

No houses that currently have sparrows can be considered safe. Typically, an older householder dies or moves to a smaller manageable flat, as the house and garden become a burden. Many aged homeowners are not normally car drivers and so the house usually has its original front garden. It’s often when houses are sold that the new owner destroys the existing front garden and hedges for their cars. This is also the time when any necessary repairs are carried out to the roof.

I wish organisations concerned with bird welfare would make stronger appeals to business and the public not to design wildlife potential out of our lives. Recent buildings and developments built in my part of London have nothing for wildlife to use at all; yet not a squawk is heard from any organisation locally except the Green Party. Our local Council seems to panda to nearly everyone who wants to build in our borough with little regard to green habitat being lost. The disappearance of house sparrows, starlings and hedgehogs are important indicators warning us of this loss in our suburban areas.

House sparrows have a close link with human habitation. Their preferred nesting choice and favored food and access to water traditionally surrounded our dwellings. Their liking for cover and dust baths make them particular in their needs, as does their desire for communal nesting and their sedentary manner. They are not like other garden birds in many ways. It is one of the wonders of bird life that there is so much variety, not just in plumage and size, but behavior.

You cannot divorce birds seen, from the habitat around in which they are likely to be found. There will always be exceptions, as when a woodcock flew into my suburban garden about 15 years ago and sat motionless for an hour amongst the dried leaves under the apple trees one autumn day. As exceptional as that was for me, it wasn’t impossible for that to happen, the woodcock found a small piece of woodland habitat on its travels.

However, usually you won’t find a cormorant sitting on a city park bench looking for scraps of fallen sandwich, like you wouldn’t expect to see a magpie diving for fish in a lake! Each bird to its own habitat, and many birds share the same habitat, food source and characteristics to a point. Yet even amongst the tit family, the way blue, great and coal tits take peanuts from the feeder and deal with them is different, as are their nesting preferences.

House sparrows also have particular habitat needs. Because house sparrows have adapted to different situations at their own pace around the world, it is seen as this tough and resilient bird that can live almost anywhere. As a species I’m sure this is true, but to expect an established suburban colony to suddenly up-sticks from a destroyed settled nest site and relocate in another suitable place as if nothing has happened is a crazy notion; yet this is what the destructive perpetrators of property think actually happens! I know, I’ve actually asked demolition workers.

If the houses sparrows occupy are pulled down to make way for a new development, and the gardens they feed from are decimated; they’ve little time to search for alternative accommodation or discover new food sources. The stress an unexpected change in their circumstance causes must not be overlooked. Just because sparrows can fly does not make them nomadic in their behaviour. Don’t we, as humans like to know where we are going? It’s a pretty risky strategy to adopt otherwise….

Likewise, putting up a sparrow nestbox won’t make house sparrows magically appear. If they are already in the district and can forage to the place where a new nest box is located - because there is adequate cover and varied food sources available - then hopefully they will explore it, move in and get established and spread further.

As regards pigeons and squirrels in gardens being an annoyance to people, it should be emphasized that other shyer birds often only make an appearance where they are wood pigeons and squirrels feeding etc., because these will act as the early warning signal for the more timid creatures. A solitary male blackcap that over-wintered in our local park one year, only seemed to visit my bird table when the bigger creatures were there, as it had no companions to watch it’s back when it fed.

If a bird is having difficulty in finding food for its young, then it must be because the place where it usually gets its food is no longer supplying it. If a lawn is no longer there because it’s been replaced by several tonnes of sand and block paving stones, its not the cranefly’s fault it can’t lay its eggs in the grass, or the house sparrow’s fault for not being able to find the leatherjackets it would like to feed its young on…. It’s the fault of the homeowner and the ‘Driveway Cowboys’ who happily perpetrate their evil trade of removing gardens and charging a fortune for it.

Maybe a better aspect to research is why people are destroying their front gardens and not leaving more greenery, and why new developments do not provide more space for an adequate garden for the residents and wildlife. Do architects really not care about these matters? Don’t they realise what social misery they are storing up for the future? Or how reckless they are being with our cities biodiversity?

A new development a mile from me has just been completed of several hundred apartments. The hedge switches planted around the perimeter and extensive car parks consist entirely of holly! I can only trust they have a mixture of male and female plants, and hopefully other vegetation will arrive naturally and be allowed to established before the holly hedge takes hold. When I consider all the other hedging plants they could have planted to give a variety of colour, food and shelter for birds, it makes me despair.

Pick up any British bird book old or new, and turn to the page on house sparrows. It usually says how the bird likes to live near our dwellings, nesting in holes and cavities in the roof or in thick ivy. It typically mentions they eat seeds, food scraps and insect larvae, and normally states how the bird lives in large family groups.

The more detailed books go on to tell how the bird usually mates for life and is sedentary in its behaviour, not venturing very far from the place of its birth, and how it loves to take dust baths. A great bird book will mention how the birds habitually congregate in large noisy groups in bushes at any time of year and perform boisterous ‘weddings’ in the spring.

Despite all these accurate descriptions universally available, we often hear how sparrows lived in the strangest of places, how they used to exist on the spilt grain from a split horse nose bag in the 1920s or how they lived down a Yorkshire coal mine, or how they used to nest in the ‘ships’ of Nelson’s fleet - or rather the ornate lampposts featuring the ships of Lord Nelson’s fleet that flank both sides of The Mall.

I’m damn sure all the amazing stories were true, but why concentrate on these hoary chestnuts when the life of an ordinary house sparrow is so easy to observe? To put out urban myths of this tough indestructible bird that can live practically anywhere does the sparrow no good at all. If it lives in extreme conditions then it has been forced to by circumstance. The isolated sparrow colonies I’m aware of, sure aren’t happy places while these poor creatures face local extinction in the future as their foraging area destructively shrinks around them.