Anatomy of a house sparrow
grasshoppers, and dynamic, wildlife-friendly gardens would build solid foundations for their recovery.
The third task of creating more nest sites brings me neatly back to my favourite pastime. House sparrows cannot rear their young if they have no homes to go to – but a safe space is easy to provide. I spend a disproportionate amount of time clambering over roofs and into trees; birdboxes and drill in tow. It’s fun – an excuse to get outside and do my bit for conservation. It’s rewarding, too – there’s nothing like watching a troop of downy, wide-eyed chicks entering this world from a nestbox you’ve put up (see box, p66).
House sparrows are worth conserving in their own right, but their return could potentially be a springboard for other urban birds to come out of decline, reinventing our towns and cities as avian havens. We are already seeing evidence of this. Watching a city skyline over the past few years, you may have noticed one or two more raptors than before, lording the thermals. All are supported by house sparrow prey. Sparrowhawks, concealed behind hedges and around building corners, will suddenly appear metres away from their quarry, killing them at breakneck speed in a flash of russet and grey. Kestrels, once tied to vole-rich grasslands, are now adapting to specifically target sparrow-sized birds in urban environments, with 400 breeding pairs now settled in central London.
Hobbies, likewise, have diversified. Formerly birds of southern moorland, they are colonising new urban haunts. Three pairs were breeding in central London by 1990 and there are now 30 in Bedford, six in Nottingham and 20 in Leicester. They’ve rapidly adapted, often taking over empty corvid nests, a change from their traditional heather stands.
Red kites, extinct in England 30 years ago following years of persecution, have undergone an even more monumental comeback, flooding their former range following reintroductions. Though they’re associated with open woodland, they’re actually rather fond of urban areas (as noted by Shakespeare) and are often seen scavenging from rubbish tips in Europe. By 2017, nearly one in 20 gardens in Reading, a city packed with more than 340,000 people, were blessed with red kites as guests.
Prior to 2019, I’d only ever seen a red kite once, drifting high above a tranquil, rural forest. Now I often see them in Portsmouth, scanning for roadkill, kitchen scraps, and house sparrow or feral pigeon chicks.
The rewilding movement is gathering huge momentum across the country, and for those that worry about living alongside predators and larger mammals, starting small could help with the transition into new, wilder surroundings. Acclimatising to live harmoniously with sparrows – who will remove your garden pests – is surely the first step to a future shared with powerful ecosystem engineers such as beavers and bison.
This prospect is too exciting to ignore, and unlike the demise of the corncrake or hen harrier, where we can feel powerless, this is an extinction in our own gardens that we can all step in to prevent. Perhaps, within a decade, we could walk down a road to the sight of sparrowhawks zigzagging down fence lines after juvenile blue tits, bombs of star-speckled starlings erupting from buzzing garden meadows, and ballerina-esque house martins leaking from our house eaves.
“I spend a disproportionate amount of time clambering over roofs and into trees; birdboxes and drill in tow”