BY STUART WINTER
EVEN a spoonful of sugar makes one of Hollywood’s most preposterous scenes hard to swallow for nature lovers. There’s prim and proper Mary Poppins singing like a lark while tidying the messy bedroom of her young charges, only for a feathery visitor to alight on her hand and start a merry duet.
Set in supposedly Edwardian London, the Oscarwinning production’s animatronic bird is meant to be a robin and, indeed it is, but of the American variety. The blooper makes Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent sound proper “cushty” by comparison.
American robins are perched on a different branch of the avian evolutionary tree from the much-loved Redbreast. Like most things from the other side of the Pond, they are bigger, bulkier and brasher than our dear national bird, but even their scientific name of Turdus migratorius – an allusion to long-distance seasonal flights the length of North America – still means a trans-Atlantic crossing is a rare event.
Fewer than 30 American robins have made it to these shores since the first one was recorded on the isle of Lundy in 1952, most occurring on far flung outcrops and certainly none in full song in the heart of the metropolis.
The observational powers of the nation’s Big Garden Birdwatchers have put this notion to flight.
Next weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the RSPB’s flagship citizen science event. More than 500,000 people will be looking out of their windows or visiting parks to tally birds over an hour-long period.
The wealth of data produced since the first Big Garden Birdwatch has been a boon for conservationists, charting the fluctuating fortunes of our commonest birds through a total of 130 million individual sightings. These show how wood pigeons and collared doves have become regular commuters into suburbia, enjoying a 950 per cent and 307 per cent increase, respectively. By contrast, the blackbird and song thrush – both close relatives of the American robin – have suffered severe declines. Blackbird sightings are down 41 per cent, song thrushes by 75 per cent.
Subtleties in population dynamics have also been picked up by the mass observations. The dire collapse in house sparrow numbers from the 1980s into the early millennium have been followed by a bit of a renaissance, with records showing a 17 per cent increase over the past decade.
For those watching bird tables and garden feeders there have been some amazing rewards. The RSPB’s Martin Fowlie tells me how the Big Garden Birdwatch, held over the last weekend of January, has seen several unusual and exotic species arriving from all points of the compass.
Out of Scandinavia have flown common rosefinch and little bunting, while a Siberian black-throated thrush recorded on Scotland’s Isle of Bute should have been sunning itself in Iran. A glorious myrtle warbler with a sunshine yellow rump was discovered by a 12-year-old girl and her younger brother while they counted starlings and sparrows in their County Durham garden in 2014. By rights, the warbler should have been hunting insects in the swamps or coffee plantations of Central America.
The biggest surprise was the American robin that settled in Peckham in 2006, later confirmed as the first sighting of the species in London and an event Mary would have said was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious...
For details to take part in Big Garden Birdwatch 2019, see rspb.org.uk/birdwatch