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Without even trying, we had reduced the numbers of the House Sparrow – the original garden bird – forever. But for many other garden birds, as for many householders, the period between the two world wars would see the dawn of a golden age – the start of what Christopher Frayling calls ‘the garden bird phenomenon’: ‘If you read books about birds in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no one talks about “garden birds”. It goes with the growth of suburbia.’
And grow suburbia certainly did. In just two decades, from 1920 to 1939, four million new homes were built across Britain, many of them in the ‘new towns’ such as Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City and Stevenage, on the outskirts of London; others in the suburbs of the capital itself. Moreover, for the first time in our nation’s history, the vast majority of these had proper gardens. Jenny Uglow believes that this came down to large-scale planning at a national level: ‘First of all there was the planning of new suburbs, with wider roads and trees, and long gardens. It’s the continuation of a passionate Victorian idea, that we must live close to nature, in order to live a good quality of life, and to be fully human.’
The interwar housing boom was the biggest garden creation scheme ever seen. Collectively, these new gardens provided a whole new man-made habitat for the birds to colonise. But it took some time for us to appreciate the wider ecological benefits this would bring – a network of ‘mini-habitats’ creating a much greater whole than the sum of the individual parts, as Mark Cocker notes: ‘The importance of gardens in cities is classically revealed if you have an aerial photograph, where you rise up above, and instead of the gardens being separate, discrete, unimportant scraps of land around each house, they form an aggregate of “semi-woodland” habitats that are actually very important, and often support a substantial diversity of birds.’ Today, gardens cover more than one million acres in area – bigger than all our nature reserves put together – and provide a vital haven for many species of songbird that would otherwise be in serious trouble, because of what is happening in the wider countryside.
The creation of the modern suburban garden during the 1920s and 1930s set the stage on which the relationship between homeowners and garden birds would play out over the rest of the twentieth century. And one species would lead the way: that quintessential garden bird, the Robin.
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No other British bird inspires quite the same affection as the Robin. Indeed the name itself is actually a nickname – just as our ancestors referred to the ‘Jenny Wren’ and ‘Tom Tit’, so the bird officially known as the ‘Redbreast’ acquired the prefix ‘Robin Redbreast’. Gradually the second part of this was dropped, and today we use only the nickname for this familiar little bird.
Part of our great affection for the Robin stems from their confiding behaviour, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘Having a wild bird like a Robin come and alight on your hand to feed really does help to form a bond between us and them, and just makes them incredibly popular.’
And their fondness for earthworms has engendered a very special relationship with gardeners, as Mark Cocker attests: ‘For anybody who is turning over soil, from the gravedigger to the lady digging her rose bed, the Robin’s cupboard love will triumph, and they’ll attend your operations with great care!’
We now know that long before human beings came along, Robins would carefully follow large animals, especially those that dig for food, such as wild boars, in order to grab a worm or two. In Britain, where these bigger mammals had mostly disappeared, the Robin transferred its affections to human beings; whereas on the European mainland, the Robin remains a shy, woodland bird.
But despite the Robin being a very common and familiar species in Britain, even by the 1930s most aspects of its behaviour were virtually unknown. This was all to change when, for the very first time in the long and intimate relationship between us and Robins, one man decided to delve a little deeper into the bird’s behaviour.
His name was David Lack, and he would go on to become one of our leading ornithologists. He pioneered the new science of population biology, notably through his detailed studies of a fascinating group of birds found on the Galapagos Islands, known as Darwin’s finches. He was also, for more than a quarter of a century, Director of the prestigious Edward Grey Institute for Field Ornithology in Oxford. But in the early 1930s, after leaving Cambridge University, he had followed a more humble calling: taking a job as a schoolmaster at Dartington College, Devon.
One of the most abundant birds in the school grounds was the Robin, and Lack decided to make a study of this common and, as was thought, familiar bird. What he discovered would change the way we regarded the Robin forever.
Lack pioneered a simple but highly effective research method that is so commonly used today it is taken for granted. So that he could identify each bird, and work out the implications of every aspect of their day-to-day behaviour, he trapped all the Robins in the area, and gave them individual colour rings.
One of his first discoveries pulled the rug from under the cherished idea that each of us has a particular Robin returning to our garden, year after year – as Lack found, most Robins live for a year or two, at most. In 1943, a decade after he began his research, Lack published his findings in a slim volume, The Life of the Robin. As a young birdwatcher growing up in Plymouth, just down the road from Dartington, Tony Soper recalls his amazement on first reading the book: ‘I was absolutely knocked out by the realisation that the Robin we had in the garden was not the same Robin we had last week, or the week before; and certainly not the same Robin as the year before!’
The Robin’s traditional reputation was further undermined by the next part of Lack’s research. Many years later, in 1969, the BBC wildlife documentary The Private Life of the Robin revealed Lack’s findings in all their colourful, gory detail to an amazed audience.
Lack had discovered that unlike most birds, which use colour primarily to attract a mate, the Robin’s red breast has a very different purpose. It has been described as ‘war paint’ – used to drive away any rival entering the Robin’s territory.
To prove that this was the case, Lack carried out a simple but highly effective experiment. He placed a dead, stuffed Robin in a prominent position in a male Robin’s territory, then stood back to see what would happen. To his astonishment, the territory holder viciously attacked the stuffed bird, pecking repeatedly at its head, and pulling off whole clumps of feathers with its bill. As the commentary of The Private Life of the Robin put it, ‘our pretty robin redbreast turns out to be a very belligerent fellow.’
Lack’s book on Robin behaviour became a surprise bestseller. The Life of the Robin also inspired a new generation of naturalists, including David Attenborough: ‘The notion that you could take one species and write a whole book in which you dealt with territory, song, behavioural postures, and so on, was a revelation – and as far as I know this was the first time that one particular bird was given that kind of intensive treatment.’
It is more than half a century since David Lack unmasked the Robin as a short-lived, feisty little bird. And yet in many ways, despite Lack’s revelations, the sentimental Victorian image of it persists today, as Mark Cocker notes: ‘There’s this curious disconnect between our notion of the “friendly Robin” – the bird that we love, the bird of our garden, the bird on our Christmas cards – that is entwined with notions of being British. And on the other hand there’s the real Robin!’
By the time The Life of the Robin was published, Britain had been at war again for four long years. And as garden historian Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall notes, the British garden was being completely redesigned as part of the war effort: ‘As far as the garden was concerned, the Ministry of Food realised there was an enormous unused land resource right there, in people’s gardens. And the top priority was to produce as much food, at home, as we possibly could.’
The Dig for Victory campaign was instigated soon after the start of the war. Run by the charismatic Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, the campaign instructed people to convert their flower-beds into vegetable patches, so that they could produce their own food to supplement their meagre rations. This helped reduce dependence on