Evolution in my lifetime
I cannot help but think some of the local birds have been going to the gym.
The speugs, in particular, have been demonstrating quite remarkable agility compared with the generations of sparrows which used to watch the titmice swarming over the nuts my mother used to hang out for them.
Those earlier generations of sparrows could only watch in envy as blue-tits and great tits performed their acrobatics and feasted upon the nuts.
If I have always regarded evolution as a process that takes centuries, even millennia, my local sparrows are proving me wrong. In my lifetime they have adapted their behaviour to such an extent that they can now fly on to the baskets of nuts and grip strongly enough to obtain a good feed. Although they cannot yet aspire to the agility of the titmice, they are pretty competent performers. This represents evolutionary development that has occurred within my lifetime.
One I watched the other day literally hung upside-down to peck away at the nuts and, even when it lost its footing with one foot, clung on valiantly with the other for long enough to satisfy its requirements. Clearly sparrows have worked on this down the years and got better and better at it.
Yet I read reports that house sparrow numbers are in freefall. This is especially true in the more urban and suburban areas, due to the lack of nesting sites available in the design of modern buildings. Here they certainly seem to be bucking the trend for their population in this airt has swollen remarkably. So prolific are they that during the summer they ensconced themselves in the swallows’ nests, much to the disgust of the swallows when they belatedly arrived.
Few birds have enjoyed such close relations with mankind as house sparrows. They probably inhabited the Garden of Eden. They certainly travelled with the first nomadic folk who set out from Africa on the great human adventure to colonise the world.
I guess that if they were not so commonplace we might admire them for their pleasantly marked plumage for they are not just little brown birds. Their plumage markings are actually quite attractive: brown and black barring on their backs and wings, the little chestnut head, a whitish collar and in the case of the males the little black bib immediately below the chunky little beak.
That little beak betrays the fact that by nature sparrows are seed-eaters, although they are opportunists who have probably existed on the scraps left by people for as long as people have inhabited the earth.
If sparrows are in some sort of decline, one of the other regular visitors here is not. Goldfinch numbers seem to be very much on the up. I often think these colourful wee birds, quite a bit smaller than sparrows, may also have been attending the gym for they are really feisty little characters, utterly unprepared to give ground to bigger birds.
They take occupancy of the feeders here very seriously and are certainly not prepared to give up their prime place on them to the larger chaffinches and sparrows, swearing away raucously at any intruders and seeing them off without giving up a millimetre of feeding territory.
I wonder if the apparent rise in goldfinch populations has anything to do with the supplying of foods such as sunflower hearts and nyger seed, now practised on a pretty universal scale. If so our generosity perhaps makes up for the times when goldfinches were prized in a more malignant way, as cage birds.
During the second half of the 19th century the capture of goldfinches so that they could be caged reached appalling proportions.
In one south coast town, Worthing, more than 130,000 of these beautiful birds were taken in a single year in 1860. Not surprisingly, with similar captures being made in other southern areas, goldfinch numbers were soon in alarming decline. Eventually the penny dropped or perhaps the fashion for caged birds simply faded.
I have been witnessing another apparent manifestation of feistiness when Viking raiders scattered other birds to the four winds as they rampaged across the landscape.
These are Scandinavian and even Russian thrushes, redwings and fieldfares. They come every year once the berry crops in their native lands become depleted and so avaricious are they that they can strip a rowan of its rich, red crop of berries in minutes. A day or two ago I watched a flock of them stripping a hawthorn.
The mistle thrush-sized fieldfares stick almost exclusively to rural areas, whereas redwings – a little smaller than our familiar song thrushes – seem to be a little bolder, often mounting sorties into towns and cities to exploit the berries of ornamental plants in parks and gardens. I well remember watching a host of redwings stripping a bush of its berries inches away from the windows of a busy public building in Glasgow.
It would seem autumn is not only the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. It is also the season of avian feistiness.