in 1952.
It took a little longer to make the leap across the North Sea. But then, in 1956, a pair of Collared Doves was discovered in a walled garden in north Norfolk – found, ironically, because the observer could not identify the birds’ unfamiliar cooing call. As a keen young birder, Bill Oddie recalls making a special trip to East Anglia to see that very first breeding pair: ‘I think one of the least glamorous twitches I ever went on was to north Norfolk, to see a pair of Collared Doves, which are ten a penny now. Somebody must have noticed them, because I think they’d been there about a year, and bred, before they were announced to the world.’
That particular pair, in a garden in the village of Overstrand, near Cromer, successfully raised two young. From then on the species never looked back. By 1960, just four years after the initial colonisation, Collared Doves had bred in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and by 1966 had successfully bred at least once in every English county.
Within a decade it had been classed as a pest species, and today the Collared Dove breeds throughout Britain and Ireland, from Shetland in the north to the Isles of Scilly in the south – an estimated total of well over a quarter of a million breeding pairs. Collared Doves have even been found in North America, although whether they arrived there naturally or escaped from captivity is open to debate.
The success of the Collared Dove is partly due to its adaptability – the species thrives equally well in towns, suburbs and villages – and partly due to its extraordinary ability to breed in every month of the year, with up to six broods. Once they fledge, immature birds tend to travel long distances, aiding the species’ rapid spread.
Despite his reservations, Mark Cocker salutes its success: ‘Certainly they’ve adapted to urban and suburban environments in an incredibly positive way, and it must now be one of the ten most common birds in the British garden.’
It is – just. In the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch survey, which took place over one weekend in January 2010, the Collared Dove squeezed into ninth place, being found in just over half of all gardens surveyed; whereas in the British Trust for Ornithology’s year-round Garden BirdWatch survey it came tenth, and was found in 72 per cent of gardens. There’s no doubt that this invader from the east is now well and truly here to stay.
Unlike the Collared Dove there was little chance of our second newcomer – the Ring-necked, or as it is sometimes called, Rose-ringed, Parakeet – slipping into the back garden unnoticed. As Mark Cocker points out: ‘In the UK they shout foreignness. They are bright green, they have red beaks, and they have this loud, raucous call…’
The arrival of parakeets, initially in West London gardens from the late 1960s onwards, soon attracted the attention of the media. In 1974, a reporter from the tea-time TV programme Nationwide visited a Mrs Vera Thompkins, who recalled the very first time she saw this exotic and unfamiliar bird outside her back window:
One came and sat on the top of the pear tree in the neighbour’s garden, and I thought what a wonderful thing it would be if it came after my birds’ food. And of course he did. Well then in a day or two there were two, a day or two after that there were three, and then four, and on Boxing Day there were twenty-two!
The Nationwide report suggested that the parakeets had probably escaped from a local aviary. But in the decades that followed their unexpected arrival in the London suburbs, all sorts of urban myths arose to try to explain their origins. These included the idea, recently given a new airing in actor Michael Caine’s biography From the Elephant to Hollywood, that they had escaped from the set of The African Queen, the feature film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, when it was being filmed at Shepperton Studios.
Plausible though this sounds, it has never been explained how or where the birds managed to hide for almost two decades from the making of the film in the early 1950s, to their initial appearance in the late 1960s.
Another wonderful urban myth about the parakeets’ origin claims that the late, great rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix kept two parakeets named Adam and Eve in his girlfriend’s apartment in London’s Carnaby Street. One day, in a drug-fuelled haze of misplaced compassion for these caged creatures, he is supposed to have opened a window and released them into the city streets.
The date of the story – 1969 – certainly fits with the initial arrival of the birds, but no one has ever managed to verify its truth. Even if they could, it seems highly unlikely that the entire UK population – now numbering well into the thousands – could have descended from just one pair.
A far more plausible explanation for their origin is that cage-bird dealers either deliberately or accidentally released flocks of parakeets in several locations around the London suburbs over a period of time, and that these sociable birds eventually managed to find each other and breed. Certainly in the past two decades numbers have increased very rapidly indeed, with more than 3,000 birds seen at a single roost at Esher Rugby Club, Surrey, until the trees in which they spent the night were cut down a few years ago.
Today the Ring-necked Parakeet is a familiar sight on garden bird feeders and in wooded parks throughout the London suburbs with small colonies of the birds spreading farther afield. They have since been recorded in many places across the country, including Yorkshire, Lancashire, North and South Wales, and southern Scotland.
Despite their tropical appearance, these parakeets are well adapted to the British climate – their origins in the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India mean they can cope perfectly well with below-zero temperatures.
They have also taken to the artificial habitat of suburbia as well as any of our other garden birds. David Attenborough, who regularly sees parakeets in his leafy garden in Richmond-upon-Thames in Surrey, welcomes their presence here: ‘I have to say I like them. They of course make a mess and they make a noise, but by golly they’re lovely, aren’t they? They’re absolutely beautiful! I get up in the morning and I look out and there are six or eight parakeets, and it doesn’t half gladden the heart.’
And yet the Ring-necked Parakeet’s acceptance as a truly British bird is not quite complete. Their propensity to feed on fruit buds, and concerns that they might drive out native hole-nesting species such as Starlings, Jackdaws and Stock Doves, has even led to the species being placed on the pest register.
‘The Urban Birder’ David Lindo, who sees the parakeets every day on his local patch at Wormwood Scrubs in West London, is definitely not a fan of what he regards as alien invaders: ‘I’m one of the growing number of people who don’t like parakeets – I actually don’t like them at all. It’s probably because they’re big, they’re green, they’ve got long tails – they just don’t seem to fit in this countryside to me.’
Mark Cocker takes a more measured view, for the moment at least:
To start with they brought a little touch of the exotic, and maybe that has darkened because they’ve become more successful, and there are rumblings that these hole-nesting birds might start to have an effect on native species. I think we’ll see changes in the response from naturalists, and we’ll see changes in response by the public. But for now, I welcome them, and I watch with fascination how the bird will be treated in the twenty-first century.
* * *
It’s no accident that the Ring-necked Parakeet and Collared Dove chose to colonise our suburban gardens rather than the wider countryside. For it was during the latter decades of the twentieth century that a revolution took place in the way we attract birds to our gardens – and at the very same time, a parallel agricultural revolution was making the wider countryside an increasingly difficult and hostile place for birds to live in.
The garden-bird revolution was born out of our growing affluence as a nation, and also from our material prosperity as individuals, which would come to define our contemporary relationship with garden birds. And it was led by bird food.
In the years since birds had first begun to come into gardens, we had fed them – when we had bothered to do so at all – on leftovers from our own table. There was one exception to this: a rather exotic addition to their diet, as environmentalist Chris Baines, who pioneered the modern concept