Survival of the noisiest: the sparrow
They’re not collaborators: once they’ve occupied the feeders, they squabble among themselves. The female birds dominate the slightly larger males.
I have mixed feelings. I had no sparrows in the garden for years, and I was delighted when they came back. There was a sharp decline in numbers across northern Europe at the turn of the century. The population seems stable, at least in Ireland, although sparrows are still amber-listed. Having an amber-listed species visit your bird feeders in increasing numbers is a good feeling, but I’m irritated by their bossiness. I wish the other birds would stand up to them. A great tit should be able to hold its ground against a sparrow.
Despite their recent European setback, house sparrows are the most widespread wild bird in the world. Their success is inextricably linked to ours and to the development of agriculture. Agriculture was ‘invented’ simultaneously in different places 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Two of these were the ‘fertile crescent’, in what is now Iraq, and the Yellow River valley, in China.
At the time, both these places had modest populations of sparrows. There’s debate about whether the difference between the two populations was at the level of a full species or a sub-species, but they were small finch-like birds that mostly ate the seeds of wild plants, particularly wild grasses.
The first farmers in the ‘fertile crescent’ cultivated and improved wild grasses to produce wheat. In the valley of the Yellow River they bred rice. The sparrows latched on to the development and prospered. Agriculture began to spread outwards from its birth places, and so did sparrows.
They travelled on ships carrying grain and conquered the world. It helped that in the 1800s emigrants in Australia and New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, in the United States and Canada, felt homesick and imported birds and animals from the home-land.
Sparrows are still spreading. In 1990, they appeared for the first time in Iceland and the Japanese island of Rishin. This is odd because the house sparrow is naturally sedentary. They seldom stray more than a couple of kilometres from the nest they were hatched in. There is a small breeding population on Inishbofin island, off the Galway coast, which returns to the mainland for the winter, a flight of 5kms.
A native shrub or small tree, capable of reaching four or five metres, and which is related to the plums and cherries, the blackthorn is widespread and common, particularly in hedgerows. It’s not as popular for hedging as white or hawthorn because it has a habit of producing root suckers which, if they’re not controlled, cause the hedge to spread outwards. It tolerates all soil types except for very wet or very acid. Small, white blossoms appear before the dull green, serrated leaves in March. The flowers need to be insect pollinated to produce sloes which can survive on the twigs for long into the winter, are an important source of food for birds and small mammals and are used by people for jellies and drinks.. The leaves are the food plant for the caterpillars of both brown and black hairstreak butterflies. The timber, is traditionally used for making walking sticks and, if harvested from mature trees, makes excellent firewood.
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