I’ve un-deliberately rescued a bird from death by sparrow-hawk. It’s not  policy or anything. Continue reading “Sparrow-hawk: accidental rescue story”

Esteemed magazine “Elsewhere Journal” is carrying a blog with extracts from my book-in-progress “Wilding the Urban Garden.

What was going on in the garden a year ago this week?

March 1^st  2020

Spring is well under way and warm weather predicted for much of the month. The sparrows are in their mating colours. The plumage of the house sparrow is mostly shades of grey brown,  giving them good camouflage as a prime prey species; but there are distinctions between the male, female and juvenile and these are more noticeable at this time of year, especially with the male and his black bib.

Sparrows are of course extremely gregarious. The call of the sparrow is a very frequent chirping which is used variously to make contact, to proclaim roosting rights, invite romance, protest or express hostility, and just about everything else. The individual does a lot of ‘social singing’ with the flock, calling together for long periods  from cover. Sparrows love  to tear apart any flowers that are yellow in colour; no-one but them knows why. They fly at 15 wingbeats per second, and can swim happily.

The house sparrow has been living with humans for eleven thousand years. Its split from its closest relative via a mutation which allowed production of an enzyme called amalay which enabled it to digest starch for the first time. This was exactly the same time humans in the middle east began settling down and growing agricultural grains which are extremely starchy but which they could therefore digest. The birds then  spread alongside humans with the development  of agriculture and the first cities. This niche helped make this bird an extremely successful and widespread species, the most widely distributed wild bird in the world, and widely adopted in human culture as a symbol of lust and sexual potency.

Adult females are known to be dominant over males despite their smaller size. How do they manage that? Maybe the males are post-feminist. Females fight over the males in the mating season, not the other way round. Sparrows are generally monogamous but can engage in extra-marital copulation, and copulation is always initiated by the female.

March 4^th

Our ever-inquisitive spaniel Rosa was barking at something in the garden today; she didn’t know what it was but she knew she didn’t didn’t like it. I went over  and saw it was a big green frog. Maybe she hadn’t come across  one that size before, or maybe she couldn’t understand why it  didn’t hop away from here as frogs should.

I took Rosa into the house where she  couldn’t see me, closed the door and went outside again. I picked up the frog, which didn’t seem to mind, and carried it by a circuitous route to the pond, placing in on the edge, whereupon it leapt into the water. When I went back into the house, Rosa wanted to go back to the frog. I let her out; she went straight back to where the frog had been and started sniffing around for it. Not finding any scent trail on the ground, she sniffed the air, picked up the scent, and with her nose lifted high proceeded to follow exactly the route I’d taken with the frog, ending up at the precise point where I had placed it at the pond’s edge. Working out that the frog was now in the pond, Rosa was happy to call off the search and move on to the next item of interest. And that’s why they use cocker spaniels to track down drugs.

March 7^th

Nest building is reaching fever pitch. In previous years we gathered bits of sheep wool off barbed wire fencing on country walks and hung it up inside those square suet-block cages, for the birds to pull out and use in their nests. But last year when cutting a hedge back in winter we found that strands of Rosa’s moulted hair formed a significant component in the inner cup of some nests, so this year we’ve been filling another suet cage with her copious haircut trimmings. When offered the choice of these two nesting materials, the birds have now switched to dog fur and left the sheep wool untouched, perhaps because Rosa’s coat is extremely warm and soft whereas the wool has natural grease in it. They empty the cage the day it’s refilled with the cosy black fur.

The birds’ choice here demonstrates an interesting principle in wildlife behaviour: they will use whatever they can get and be perfectly happy with that, but when something better becomes available they’ll go for that instead. They’re adaptable. It’s also a small way in which Rosa and ourselves can play  an interactive role in the garden’s ecosystem.

Winter is passing; how was it for the garden wildlife?

Winter is all about survival for resident and visiting garden species; reproduction is on the back burner – but not for long. It’s all about finding enough to eat and trying not to get eaten.

It’s been a somewhat mild and wet winter here on the south coast of England, but with a week or two very cold snap, and snow just about everywhere. But there’s always plenty of wildlife activity in this particular garden,

Sparrows are my great favourites, all year round. Even in the coldest weather I hear their din of cheerful sounding chatter at the start and the end of each day. I change the seed feeder to a suet block cage at the very coldest times. Blue-tits are on this as soon as the sparrows leave it. Other birds feed on the bits dropped to the ground below: especially the pair of blackbirds, he chasing her away – he’ll change his tune soon, for spring – and the robin, who holds this territory and sings all year round to achieve that.

The food I supply like this is only supplementary; there’s plenty of natural food in the garden for most of the year: insects, nuts, fruits, berries, foliage and roots. The blackbirds have also been eating the last of the decayed windfall apples, getting inebriated on the alcoholic content, and the ivy and holly berries which they’ve had to share with visiting flocks of Redwing from Scandinavia. On warmer days, bumblebee queens have come out of hibernation to sip on nectar from the winter flowering Mahonia. The grey squirrel has been looking for the hazel nuts she buried in the autumn, and not always finding them, so that we get a forest of new saplings to give to others for their wildlife gardens. The woodmouse has been gathering seed fallen from the feeders too, but also raiding our apple store.

Predators have been around too. Foxes are making their bloodcurdling winter calls as they work up to mating. The visiting sparrow-hawk snatches the occasional unwary sparrow, evidenced by a neat circle of its feathers on the ground. When this happens the other sparrows keep a low profile for a couple of days, staying under cover when  making any noise.

The hedgehog has been hibernating, but will be out and about soon. We’ve had to rescue a very young one that was out and about in the cold and didn’t have enough body weight to get through the winter; the local animal rescue centre stepped in, and will release it, fattened up, when hibernation time is over.

It’s been a good winter; most of our garden residents and visitors have survived. And spring is definitely on its way. Watch this space…

recording of a nightingale singing, recorded by the author:

Why does birdsong sound so beautiful to us?

Everyone loves to listen to birdsong, but have you ever wondered why?

To other birds, birdsong doesn’t sound beautiful – it’s full of either self-advertisement – “Look at me, I would be a fantastic mate for you” or venom and vitriol and swearing – “Keep away, this is my blank blank blank territory”

For a long time I found myself wondering why birdsong should sound to great to us. The question I always want to ask about these matters is, what’s the evolutionary benefit we would get from finding it so mesmeric when for the birds it’s a very serious expression of life-and-death struggle for survival and reproduction?

I can think of a number of possible answers. As an ancient species out in the wild without wristwatches and calendars, birdsong for us would be one useful indicator of time of day and of the progression of the seasons. It would also be an indicator of potential food opportunity – and of potential danger when alarm calls are sounded. Plentiful birdsong may have indicated that we nomads are in a wildlife-productive  area that may make it  worthwhile to hang around for a while. Birdsong in general  is one of the strong sensory experiences that draws us into the world of nature and wildness to which we’re still so primordially connected.

But there must be more to it than this – it doesn’t really explain the auditory beauty aspect – and there is. Biologists at McGill University in Montreal have recently discovered that songbirds and humans have very similar biological hardwiring in the brain that shapes how we each produce and perceive sounds. Young birds, they’ve found, are intrinsically predisposed to learn certain particular kinds of sound pattern over others, and these favoured patterns happen to resemble those found most frequently in human speech and in human music too.

These common brain mechanisms or  ‘universals’ had already been demonstrated by linguistic experts as occurring across all human languages. Naom Chomsky postulated that these constitute a ‘universal grammar’ which aids language learning in the individual as well as communication across language and cultural barriers. But the direct link to the same patterns in birdsong is new.

So when we listen to birdsong we’re connecting directly to the ancient common linguistic forms that our innate brain wiring recognises. And the more of these universal patterns a bird weaves into the song – as with blackbird, nightingale or song-thrush – the more spellbound we become.

How to Create an Amazing Urban Wildlife Garden
– what we’ve learned in 15 years

Gerry Thompson

In 2002 we moved our family home from Brighton UK to a nearby town. The reason? – we didn’t have a garden. Our new home had two gardens, neither very large. The rear would be the domain of our lively cocker spaniel Rosa, and the front space would be for …wildlife!

Now, 16 years later, that front patch is a wildlife paradise – a veritable jungle among many houses with more sterile gardens or hard-standings for their cars. So what better than having wild nature right where you live? Continue reading “Our wildlife garden”