Birds Britannia. Stephen Moss

view Magpies – as the arch-villain of the garden soap opera – as a case in point. ‘Magpies are big, bold songbirds, with not much of a song, with a great taste for young songbirds of other species, and we really hate the fact that they eat our Blackbirds, and steal tits out of the bushes.’ But Magpies are fascinating birds too – intelligent and calculating. Tim Birkhead certainly thinks so, as he wrote a book about them, The Magpies, in 1991:

      They’re confident, they’re cocky, and they’re incredibly smart. So they will find a Blackbird or Song Thrush nest, and if the parents mob them or chase them away, they just bide their time, and come back at a more appropriate time. And then, much to everybody’s horror they butcher the offspring on the lawn in front of you.

      Branded as baby-killers, there’s a popular view, promulgated through lurid headlines in the tabloid newspapers and on the web, that Magpies are responsible for a decline in songbirds. Tim Birkhead utterly refutes this: ‘There’s no scientific evidence that Magpies have been responsible for the decrease in garden birds or songbirds. The British Trust for Ornithology was involved in a very detailed survey, we at the University of Sheffield were involved too, and from a scientific point of view there’s no evidence for that.’

      So, although perhaps the majority of Britons blame the Magpie for a perceived decrease in songbird populations (even though, incidentally, the populations of most garden bird species are on the rise), others admire their intelligence and tenacity. Among their impassioned proponents is David Lindo: ‘Magpies I defend to the death. I’ve had many fights with people over them, and people saying that Magpies and Sparrowhawks are causing the decline of songbirds. Well I think we’re using Magpies and Sparrowhawks as scapegoats, because we are the animal that has caused the decline of songbirds much more than them.’

      When viewing the garden-bird soap opera through anthropomorphic spectacles, we are often blind to the real villains – to our own role in the drama. As well as the negative effects of modern farming, industry and transport policies on bird populations, there is another factor much closer to home. Britain’s domestic cats kill fifty-five million birds every year. This has placed organisations such as the RSPB in a tricky position: do they condemn cats as ‘unnatural’ killers of our native birds, and risk losing cat-loving members, or do they ignore the problem? So far they have tried to occupy the middle ground, offering advice on how to minimise the carnage by keeping cats indoors at dawn and dusk, or putting a bell on them. Whether this will eventually reduce the number of birds killed by cats we shall have to wait and see.

      So although our relationship with garden birds is thoroughly modern, our attitudes to individual species remain pretty traditional, resistant to change even in the face of new scientific evidence.

      We have our favourites, like the Robin; our friends, like the Blue Tit; and our enemies – top of the list being the Magpie and the Sparrowhawk. And in the garden-bird family there has always been one poor relation: the House Sparrow.

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      The recent history of Britain’s sparrows reveals not only the strength of our passion for our feathered neighbours, but also our inability as garden owners to influence their fate. David Lindo, who has lived in London for the whole of his life, remembers what the situation was like when he was growing up in the capital during the 1970s and 1980s:

      As a birder I never really used to look at sparrows, and then after a while I realised they weren’t around any more. I used to see them all over the place – in Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, if you went to the cafés and sat down for a cup of tea there would be sparrows by your feet. And then all of a sudden there were none there.

      The rapid decline of the House Sparrow, from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, was documented by the greatest ornithologist of the twentieth century, Max Nicholson. As a young man, in 1925, Nicholson carried out a survey of the birds of Kensington Gardens, the London park near his home. Of almost 5,000 individual birds he counted, 2,600 – more than half – were House Sparrows.

      In the autumn of 2000, seventy-five years after his initial survey, the ninety-six-year-old Nicholson returned to Kensington Gardens to count the birds once again. This time he found just eight sparrows – a decrease of well over 99 per cent in the intervening years. Today, a decade or so later, there are none.

      Bill Oddie, who has lived in London since the 1960s, recalls seeing one famous form of interaction between human beings and sparrows: ‘Every park had an old gentleman, who fed the sparrows, and he always had his arms out and a hat on, and he’d be covered in them. And you could do it too. I’ve got photographs from that time, but you won’t find this happening now.’

      In the early 1990s, people living in Britain’s towns and cities began to notice that their local sparrows were rapidly disappearing. Sparrow expert Denis Summers-Smith, who has studied the species since the late 1940s, takes up the story: ‘They wrote to their local newspapers, they contacted their local councillors, questions were even asked in the House of Commons – what is happening to our sparrows?’

      Having been taken for granted for so long, the House Sparrow was suddenly on our radar. A nation of bird-lovers was demanding to know what was going on with their cheeky little chappy. In May 2000, a major national newspaper, the Independent, launched a campaign to investigate. They offered a prize of £5,000 for the first person to write a published paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which explained the reasons for the sparrows’ sudden decline in our towns and cities.

      The answer still isn’t clear, but we do know that sparrow chicks are dying in the nest of starvation due to a shortage of insect food, and even those that fledge are not surviving to maturity. Together with other factors, such as the shortage of nest-sites (due to the ‘yuppification’ of housing and attic conversions, causing the removal of nest-sites under eaves), this appears to have dealt a fatal blow to the urban sparrow population.

      Ironically, history may be repeating itself. Having initiated the decline of House Sparrows in the 1930s, motor vehicles are once again being linked to the current catastrophic fall in numbers. Denis Summers-Smith, who when he wasn’t studying sparrows was pursuing a distinguished career as an industrial chemist, believes he knows the reason why: ‘The one common cause, I think, is atmospheric pollution, coming from motor vehicles.’

      Summers-Smith suggests that a component added to unleaded petrol to prevent ‘knocking’ in engines may be killing off the insects on which the baby sparrows so depend. He also believes that other chemicals, emitted by diesel engines, may also be damaging the respiratory systems of sparrow chicks, preventing them from reaching maturity.

      So although the Independent’s prize has not yet been awarded, it seems certain that a combination of factors beyond the garden fence is responsible for the sparrow’s demise. Much like the miner’s Canary, our sparrows may be telling us something important about our own environment. Denis Summers-Smith certainly believes so: ‘Sparrows live in our urban habitat, and if something is happening to them it is high time we knew what it is, because it may be happening to us later on.’

      In August 2007, our longest-standing garden bird, once so numerous as to have been considered a pest, was put on the Red List of threatened species.

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      The creation of the modern British garden gave us a new, suburban space, in which we forged an equally modern relationship with the birds that came to live alongside us. Garden birds are creatures of our making, and by watching and feeding them we’ve come to know them intimately, and drawn them deeper into our domestic and emotional lives than any other group of birds.