The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (15 page)

The bird we are talking about is the house sparrow,
Passer domesticus
, which has hitherto been one of the world’s most successful creatures. It occurs naturally all across Europe, much of Asia and North Africa, and has been introduced to Southern Africa, the Americas and Australasia: Antarctica is the only continent without it. It has been found breeding at 14,000 feet up in the Himalayas and nearly 2,000 feet down in Frickley Colliery near Doncaster (really: in 1979). It is one of the world’s commonest birds, and almost certainly the most widespread; but more than that, it is beyond doubt the most familiar. Down the ages, the house sparrow has generated a special affection in us, based on its close association with people and towns, and a perception of its character as humble but hardy; as an urchin, but an urchin
that lives on its wits. When Hamlet told Horatio there was a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, he was making it the exemplar of the lowly, but the bird was that already, more than sixteen hundred years earlier in Rome: Catullus’ famous and charming poem on the death of Lesbia’s sparrow is mock-elegiac, calling all Venuses and Cupids to grieve for his lover’s beloved pet. Lowly, yes; but also street smart, like Paris’s most celebrated singer, tiny and irrepressible, who called herself after the French slang word for sparrow,
piaf
.

The house sparrow has needed its survival skills. When I asked the world expert on the bird and on sparrows in general, Denis Summers-Smith, what he liked most about them, he took me by surprise; he said: ‘I greatly admire their ability to live with an enemy.’ ‘Who’s the enemy?’ I said. ‘Man,’ he said. I said I thought that sparrows and humans had always got along fine, but he disabused me of that; farmers in particular used to hate them for the grain they consumed, he said, yet the birds continued to live on farmhouses. They were often killed, but they managed to get by, from generation to generation, by remaining intensely wary of this primate with whom they had thrown in their lot. Speaking of when he first began observing them closely, from his Hampshire garden in the late 1940s, Denis said: ‘If I was gardening, they wouldn’t look at me, but if I started to look at them, then they would look at me. They were very conscious of me. If I was going about my normal business, they weren’t bothered, but as soon as I started watching them, they would watch me back.’

A Scottish engineering consultant and former senior scientific adviser to ICI, who at the time of writing is ninety-three and still going strong, Denis has been studying the twenty-seven members of the genus
Passer
, and
Passer domesticus
in particular, for nearly seventy years, a lifelong interest which has made him perhaps the most eminent amateur ornithologist in Britain of the second half of the twentieth century, with five books on
sparrows to his name, including the standard monograph,
The House Sparrow
, published in the famous Collins New Naturalist series in 1963. In them, he elucidated many aspects of sparrow private life which yet may have a bearing on its mysterious London collapse; two in particular are that sparrows are very sedentary, and sparrows are very social. They are in fact the most sedentary of all songbirds, usually living out their lives within a one-kilometre radius, and foraging if they can within fifty metres of the nest; and their sociability is just as pronounced. Sparrows live in colonies: they deeply need and depend upon each other. This is vividly illustrated by the behaviour Denis has christened ‘social singing’. After feeding, with their crops full of seeds which need time to be digested, sparrows gather in cover such as a thick bush, in groups of typically a dozen, and sit back, as it were, and begin cheeping to each other. The call generally sounds like a monosyllabic
cheep
, although if you slow it down, it is clearly a disyllabic
chirrup
! They each take it in turns to give a single sound, with a separated abruptness which is very distinctive:

Hey!

What?

You!

What?

You!

Eh?

Who?

Him.

Him?

Nah.

Her?

Nah.

Me?

Nope.

Him?

Yup.

Really?

Yup.

Me?

Yeah.

Oh.

Yeah.

Why?

What?

Me.

Cos.

What?

You.

Eh?

This was one of the most familiar sounds of my childhood in the suburbs, when sparrows were everywhere; it is almost wholly lost from London now, even though comparable small songbirds, from robins and wrens to blue tits and blackbirds, continue to give full voice in the capital’s parks, and the other archetypal bird of the city, the feral pigeon, prospers as ever in London’s streets (and makes up most of the diet of the peregrine falcon, several pairs of which now breed in the heart of the capital). What was different about the house sparrow, that it was singled out for disappearance?

Certainly, there had been an extended decline through the length of the twentieth century: the figures are there. In November 1925 a young man of twenty-one went into one of central London’s greenest parks, Kensington Gardens, and with the help of his brother counted the house sparrows: there were 2,603 of them. The man was Max Nicholson, a passionate ornithologist and the founding father of Britain’s environmental institutions, who as a senior civil servant in 1949 brought into
being the world’s first statutory conservation body, the Nature Conservancy, and subsequently ran it for fifteen years; he ended up as the Grand Old Man of the natural world in Britain, having been the founding secretary of the British Trust for Ornithology, president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and having helped to launch, in 1961, the first of the world’s great Green pressure groups, the World Wildlife Fund (now the Worldwide Fund for Nature). But for all his prominence in officialdom, Nicholson remained a practical ornithologist at heart, and in December 1948 he repeated his Kensington Gardens sparrow survey: there were then 885 birds. In November 1966 there were 642, and in November 1975 there were 544; but when he took part in the count in February 1995, at the age of ninety-one, there were a mere 46, and on 5 November 2000 I went back with him to Kensington Gardens – he was ninety-six by now – and we watched as members of the Royal Parks Wildlife Group carried out a seventy-fifth anniversary census of his original count: they found 8 birds.

What on earth had happened? The earlier decline apparent in the Nicholson figures, between 1925 and 1948, has been attributed to the disappearance from London’s streets of the horse, and the loss of the grain spilled from nosebags and even the undigested grain in horse manure, which was an important source of food for small birds; but then for forty years or more the sparrow population was on what we might call a gently declining slope. However, from about 1990, it fell off a cliff: this is the enigma. In Buckingham Palace gardens, which in the sixties supported up to twenty sparrow pairs, there were none after 1994; and in St James’s Park, where once sparrows could be found by the hundred, where squabbling flocks of them would cluster on the shoulders and arms and palms of bird-food-proffering tourists – I can remember that myself – a single pair nested in 1998, and in 1999, for the first time, no birds bred.

Alert observers began to notice. Among the first was Helen Baker, then the secretary of the ornithology research committee of the London Natural History Society, whose morning walk to work at the Ministry of Agriculture in Whitehall took her through St James’s Park. In particular she noticed that the sparrows had gone from the shrubbery at the end of the bridge over the lake, where in the past she had counted the birds by the hundred and had had them feeding from her hand; and in 1996 she organised the LNHS house sparrow survey, to try and get a handle on what was happening. News of the decline began to seep out in London’s evening paper, the
Evening Standard
; I myself became aware of it in 1999, realising that the sparrows had gone from my commuter terminus, Waterloo Station, where once they had been plentiful. I began to look out for them, and couldn’t spot them; but it was not until a trip to Paris with my wife and children in March 2000 that the true scale of the situation dawned on me, for in the French capital
les piafs
were everywhere, in stark contrast to London, where now they seemed to be nowhere. I wrote a piece about it which was featured prominently in my newspaper, the
Independent
; I continued writing about it; and eventually in May 2000 we launched a campaign to Save The Sparrow, the centrepiece of which was a £5,000 prize for the first scientific paper published in a peer-reviewed journal which would explain the vanishing of the house sparrow from London and other urban centres, in the opinion of our referees, who were the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the British Trust for Ornithology, and Dr Denis Summers-Smith.

The
Independent
’s campaign, and especially the offer of the £5,000 prize, put the disappearance of London’s sparrows firmly on the news agenda nationally and internationally – it was reported around the world – and it elicited a substantial reader response, with nearly two hundred and fifty letters in the first weeks (about twenty of them being emails; this was just on the
cusp of the email revolution, and most of the missives were still handwritten or typed). There were two significant aspects to this. One was the surprising passion with which people lamented something so seemingly inconsequential as the disappearance of a small brown bird: it was as if an emotional floodgate had been opened, a commonly expressed feeling being gratitude that someone besides the writer had at last taken note of this development and also considered it important (‘I thought it was only me . . .’).

The other prominent aspect to the response, of course, consisted of readers’ theories for the disappearance, and two weeks after launching the campaign, we listed ten of them. They were, in order of frequency of expression: predation by magpies; predation by sparrowhawks; predation by cats; the effect of pesticides; the tidying up of houses and gardens, which removes nesting places; loft insulation, ditto; climate change; the effects of radiation from the Chernobyl disaster; the introduction of lead-free petrol to Britain in the 1990s; and finally, peanuts (the suggestion being that the vogue for putting peanuts in bird feeders was perhaps upsetting the sparrows’ digestion – fatally). The response reflected the detestation of the British bird-feeding classes for the magpie, the bold black-and-white crow which from the 1970s onwards had moved from its previous rural habitat into suburban and urban gardens – the sparrowhawk effected a similar shift in the 1990s – and was often observed preying, with upsetting relish, on songbirds, their nests and eggs and chicks. Nearly all the letters were deeply felt, although the odd one was a tad presumptuous (‘It’s cats. Send money to address below . . .’).

But if deeply felt, they did not necessarily reflect expert judgement, so I sought out the experts. I went to see the venerable Max Nicholson in his house in a backwater of Chelsea, and in his curious high-pitched lisp, with an articulacy quite undimmed by the imminent approach of his ninety-sixth birthday,
he advanced what at first seemed to me to be a quite startling idea: that, in his words, sparrows as a species had a strong suicidal tendency. What he meant was that if sparrow numbers, in the colonies in which they nested, fell below a certain level – for reasons such as a lack of food – the colony might suddenly cease breeding and dissolve. The problem, he thought, was ultimately a psychological one: the birds, which were so strongly social, felt that life in such low numbers was no longer worth living. The basis of this idea is actually supported by a well-known piece of biological theory, the Allee effect, which states that declines in socially breeding species can become self-reinforcing, but it was the vividness with which Max Nicholson expressed it which initially took me aback. ‘I think they suddenly get to a critical point where they say, let’s give up,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s about safety in numbers. I think it’s psyche.’ He said that this should be correlated absolutely with material factors like food shortage, which was his own suggested trigger for the initial numbers drop which might precipitate a psychological crisis; and he stressed he was speculating, and fully accepted that what he was suggesting would be difficult to verify experimentally. ‘I accept it’s an element that can’t be measured,’ he said. ‘It’s a psychological thing – there’s no scientific way of measuring it.’

He smiled.

‘But a lot of things that can’t be measured, are real.’

I thought then and I think now that Max Nicholson may have been right and that sparrow colonies might well drop in numbers to the point where they suddenly dissolved; but the mystery was, what was causing the drop? And Denis Summers-Smith, when I went to see him at his home in Guisborough in the north-east of England, had a specific view about that. With his intimate knowledge of sparrow biology, he was aware that although sparrows are granivorous birds – they feed on seeds – the sparrow chicks, for the first few days of their lives, need insect food, such as aphids (the greenfly abhorred by
gardeners), small grubs, flies, and spiders. He conjectured that insect numbers might have fallen, and to the point where the chicks might starve and the birds’ reproductive rate might fall itself, triggering a population decline, since to make up for natural winter mortality and maintain their population levels, sparrows need to rear between two and three broods of chicks every summer.