And yet our relationship with garden birds is a surprisingly modern one. It is the result of some of the most dramatic changes in British society in the last hundred and fifty years.
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We are a nation of gardeners who have become a nation of garden-bird lovers. Our long and cherished relationship with our gardens is clear from the huge popularity of television and radio programmes such as Gardeners’ World and Gardeners’ Question Time, as well as the plethora of gardening magazines on sale in our newsagents. This has undoubtedly helped to influence and define our relationship with the birds that live alongside us.
Today, two out of three of us feed wild birds in our gardens, spending over £150 million pounds a year in the process. This relationship brings a mutual benefit, whereby the birds are fed, and we are entertained by watching them. And for many people, this simple act of kindness to our fellow creatures is the entry point into a deeper relationship with wildlife as a whole; a relationship that may span their entire lifetime.
Yet only a century ago, most of us did not even have gardens. We took little interest in the welfare of our feathered neighbours, and were more likely to eat a Blackbird than to feed it. The very concept of ‘garden birds’ was meaningless – as environmental historian Rob Lambert points out, the term hadn’t even been invented: ‘“Garden birds” is a cultural construct – these are simply birds that have taken advantage of the new suburban landscapes we have created. These are birds of the woodland edge that have moved into what we have defined as “gardens”.’
As the landscape of Britain changed, so birds that had evolved to live in our woods and forests – tits, thrushes, woodpeckers and many more – found sanctuary in our gardens. They were joined by birds of more open countryside – finches, pigeons and doves – that also exploited the plentiful opportunities for food, shelter and nesting places in our backyards.
As the wider countryside became less and less suitable for birds, due to the intensification of agriculture and the resulting loss of habitat, so gardens became the prime habitat for many of these species – effectively turning them from woodland and farmland birds into what we now call ‘garden birds’.
So in little more than a century, an extraordinary transformation has taken place in our relationship with the birds that live alongside us. This domestic drama runs parallel to the history and development of that very British phenomenon, the modern suburban garden. But it’s a story that begins ten thousand years ago, when one adaptable little bird sought out our company for the very first time: the House Sparrow.
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The House Sparrow is often taken for granted, but it is a particular favourite of birder and broadcaster Tony Soper: ‘It’s a small, chunky little bird, with wonderful chestnuts and browns – in a drab sort of way it’s a very colourful bird. But mostly what’s good about the sparrow is its behaviour – the cheeky “cockney spadger”!’
House Sparrows have lived alongside humans longer than any other wild bird – since our prehistoric ancestors first abandoned their hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favour of farming, leading to a more settled way of life, as Mark Cocker explains:
The sparrow’s engagement with us is peculiarly intimate, and is rooted in the development of agriculture. Agriculture is thought to have originated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and House Sparrows probably spread across Europe, as agriculture was spread from community to community. And as they moved, they found a way to live beside us.
Sparrows found nest sites on our homes and food in our fields and farmyards. Indeed they are now only found in and around human settlements, and have spread, via deliberate and accidental introductions, across much of the globe. Today the familiar chirp of the House Sparrow can be heard in towns and cities in North and South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand; and in many of these places they have exploited vacant ecological niches to the detriment of native species.
But in the view of Denis Summers-Smith, an amateur ornithologist who has studied sparrows for more than sixty years, their very dependence on us meant that we viewed them with suspicion from the outset: ‘Sparrows, from very early on, were regarded as pests, because they fed on the cereal crops the farmers were growing.’
By the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, in the second half of the sixteenth century, sparrows had a price put on their heads, thanks to the passing of an Act of Parliament branding them as agricultural pests. As a result, people would take the head of each sparrow to the parish church where they’d be paid a small bounty.
Since that time, farming communities all over Britain have waged war on sparrows to safeguard their crops. Mark Cocker believes that this has had long-term consequences, helping to define our current relationship with this familiar little bird: ‘One of the interesting things about sparrows is that they’ve never really lost a shyness, a difficulty of approach, in the way that Blue Tits and Robins have lost their fear of us… And I think that’s to do with the way that because they ate grain they were harvested and eaten.’
But it’s not all that easy to catch such a clever bird – so in the seventeenth century our ancestors turned to the Netherlands for a practical solution, according to Denis Summers-Smith:
Dutch engineers who had come over to drain the Fens brought with them what were known as ‘sparrow-pots’. These were put up on farm buildings, primarily to prevent the sparrows nesting in the thatch; but also, because they were on a hook, they could be lifted off. The housewife could put her hand in the back and remove either the sparrows or the eggs, and these would very often go into a pot in the kitchen.
The number of tiny eggs required to make a decent omelette, or birds to make a pie, might appear hardly worth the trouble of collecting or catching them. Yet it must have been worthwhile, as this practice continued far longer than we might imagine – sparrows were caught and eaten in the countryside until the middle of the twentieth century.
But some Britons had already begun to take a very different view of this little bird, as a result of the biggest social change in British history. This was the wholesale migration of millions of people from the countryside into the towns, to meet the increased need for labour in factories required by the Industrial Revolution. Rural historian Jeremy Burchardt regards this as a key turning-point in the history of our nation:
In the nineteenth century the balance of population between rural England and urban England changed quite dramatically. In the early nineteenth century the great majority of people lived in the countryside; by 1900 only about one in five people did. So we had effectively changed from being a rural nation into being an urban nation in the space of a few generations.
Given how dependent House Sparrows were on humans, it’s not surprising that, as we moved into towns, they were the one bird that came along with us. They were partly able to do so because, as historian Jenny Uglow explains, the differences between urban and rural areas were not all that great:
One aspect to the growing cities is that they were still terribly close to the country; not just physically, but the fact that there were a lot of agricultural animals actually in the city. You had horses everywhere, you had stables, and also in the parks – like in St James’s Park in London – there were cows, there were sheep. So those birds which thrive on dung and seeds like the sparrow could find the city quite a happy home.
Arguably sparrows enjoyed better living conditions in Victorian cities than did much of the human population. Denis Summers-Smith notes that these newly built dwellings created to house the growing human population provided safe for the birds too: places to nest, where they were safe from attack by birds of prey and cats.
But the other reason for the success of sparrows in our towns and cities was a change in our attitude towards them. People rather welcomed the presence of this little bird, which perhaps reminded them of their ancestral home.
The townsfolk’s new-found affection for sparrows was undoubtedly a reaction to urbanisation – a disorientating process that cut millions of Britons off from wild nature, and at