Sparrows were a damned nuisance.   When I was a boy, over 50 years ago now, they were pretty well everywhere.  They fluttered all over our suburban garden on the Wirral.  When I walked over our tiny lawn, all of four strides, they would move before me like a wave. Their nuisance value was not anything they did specifically, it was their sheer abundance. 

Today these omnipresent creatures of my youth have declined so far that they are becoming a rarity.  I now live in the north of Scotland in the town of Inverness. The only place I can see them in the kind of numbers I recall is outside the local pet shop where they survive by picking up the seeds dropped by customers walking how with packets of budgie seeds.

When I was fourteen my father took me to Mullingar, a village in County Westmeath Ireland.  It’s easy to look back on the holidays of one’s youth with rose tinted glasses but I recall an idyllic place that still moved at a pace forty years behind my Merseyside home.   We were collected from the station by a bloke in a horse and cart and taken the few miles through country roads to our hotel which boasted a few lakes were we could seek elusive carp.

What made the biggest impression on me as a young boy was the incredible abundance of wildlife I saw all around me.  The fields were full of wild flowers and the air buzzed with insects.  At night moths danced about the windows and would fill the room with fluttering wings if you were foolish enough to leave the windows open. By contrast my home seemed devoid of life, its farmland intensively cultivated to with dairy herds everywhere to supply the needs of a thirsty Liverpool just a few miles away across the River Mersey.

The catastrophic decline in our bird population is well documented.  In Benedict MacDonald’s book Rebirding he talks about the gradual industrialisation of our landscape, I guess you could call that “unwilding” beginning even before Medieval times.  His explanation for my sparrow filled childhood is fascinating.  From around 1880 to 1930 there was a massive increase in arable farming to feed the huge growth in the population of the British Isles.   In the century 1801 to 1901 the UK population tripled from around 10 million to 30 million. The demand for food rose commensurately and agriculture went into overdrive. During that period crops were rotated, meaning a variety of crops would be grown on the same land to ensure the fertility of the soil.  Growing just one crop would ‘burn out’ the soil.

Rotation gave the perfect environment for the humble sparrow.  All year round there were seeds and insects to feed on and this led to a huge rise in the sparrow population.  There was a limit to the amount of food the land could grow even with rotation and in the 1930s fertilizer was introduced which meant rotation no longer took place.  The began the decline in the sparrow population we see today.

My Dad always blame the introduction of pesticides as the reason why he saw so few sparrows in his garden.  Whilst that’s true it’s probably more accurate to say that the development of the use of fertiliser that began the decline by ending the need for rotation.  My dad was born in 1925, just about the peak of the sparrow’s  domination of the suburban skies.  Had he been born 100 years earlier he’d have seen far fewer sparrows in his early year and been wondering where the hell they all came from in his old age.  Also if he’d been born a hundred years earlier I’d have been dead for over half a century which would be bloody inconvenient.

All this adds power to the argument that we all need to move towards a plant based diet. There are a lot of positive things we can do to bring the wild back into our country.  I’m convinced that organic food is an important way forward.  I’d never been convinced that organic vegetables are  healthier to us as individuals but it certainly seems that their avoidance of using fertilisers could certainly help the environment. I’ll be reviewing Rewilding in full soon.  It’s nice to know my Dad was right about the sparrows.