Michael McCarthy (b. 1947) is one of Britain’s leading writers on the environment and the natural world. He was Environment Correspondent of The Times before becoming the long-standing Environment Editor of the Independent. Awards for his journalism include Specialist Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards and the RSPB medal for ‘outstanding services to conservation’. As an author he has written Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo (2009), a study of Britain’s summer migrant birds, and The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (2015), which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and the Richard Jefferies Prize. His latest book is The Consolation of Nature: Spring in the Time of Coronavirus (2020) written with Jeremy Mynott and Peter Marren.
Moths have long been unloved. There are about a dozen mentions of moths in the Bible and all of them are unfavourable: they are wretched little brown things akin to rust, which eat your clothes, as well as your books and your tapestries, if you believe the Good Book, and nothing more. The prejudice has been persistent: people have for centuries seen moths as haunting the night, like owls and bats, like ghosts and goblins and evil-doers, and thus sinister and shudder-provoking, whereas butterflies, their relatives, eternally symbolise sunshine and have been adored. Yet in my own country of Britain, perceptions are changing. Lovers of the natural world are becoming more and more drawn to moths, many of which are every bit as big and as bold in their colour schemes as butterflies are, such as the black and cream and orange Jersey tiger, or the pink and green elephant hawkmoth, or even the legendary Clifden nonpareil, the outsize and shadowy species which shows on its underwings a sumptuous colour found nowhere else in the moth world: lilac blue. The difficulty of seeing them at night can easily be circumvented with a moth trap, essentially just a powerful light attached to a box, which exists in several designs but is always based on the same principle: moths are attracted to light, moths fall into box, moths settle down and go to sleep, and then can be released perfectly unharmed in the morning – after you’ve had a close look at them and identified them. This may seem like prime nerd territory, and sure, it may be, but the number of nerds is soaring: according to the charity Butterfly Conservation, there may now be as many as ten thousand enthusiasts in Britain operating moth traps in their gardens on summer nights. I am one of them.
When you do that, you start to realise for the first time a basic wildlife truth: it is moths, not butterflies, which are the senior partners in the order Lepidoptera, the scale-wing insects, even if in our culture, the positions have been reversed. For there are about 200,000 moth species in the world, as a ballpark figure, but only about 20,000 butterflies: butterflies are just a branch, halfway down, on the moth evolutionary tree, a group of moths which split off and evolved to fly by day, and developed bright colours to recognise each other. This disparity in species numbers is even more pronounced in Britain, where there are a mere 58 regularly breeding butterfly species, but about 900 larger moths (all with English common names) and another 1,600 or so smaller or micro-moths (which for the most part have only scientific names in Latin), for a total of about 2,500. Thus, in the world as a whole, there may be ten times as many moth species as butterfly species; but in Britain, it is approaching fifty times as many.
This means, of course, that in the dark there are far, far more moths out and about than ever there are butterflies during the daytime; it’s just that we don’t see them. Or at least, we didn’t, until the invention of the automobile. The headlight beams of a speeding car on a muggy summer’s night in the countryside, turning the moths into snowflakes and crowding them together the faster you went, in the manner of a telephoto lens, meant that the true startling scale of their numbers was suddenly apparent, not least as they plastered the headlights and the windscreen until driving became impossible, and you had to stop the car to wipe the glass surfaces clean. (I know there are many other insects active at night as well, but let the moths stand proxy for the rest.) Of all the myriad displays of abundance in the natural world in Britain, the moth snowstorm was the most extraordinary, as it only became perceptible in the age of the internal combustion engine. Yet now, after but a short century of existence, it has gone.
In recent years I have often talked to people about it, and I am surprised, not just at how many of those over fifty (and especially over sixty) remember it, but at how animated they become once the memory is triggered. It’s as if it were locked away in a corner of their minds, and in recalling it and realising that it has disappeared, they can recognise what an exceptional phenomenon it was, whereas at the time, it just seemed part of the way things were. For example, I talked about it to one of Britain’s best-known environmentalists, Peter Melchett, the former director of Greenpeace UK and now the policy director of the Soil Association, the pressure group for organic farming. As soon as I raised the subject he said: ‘I remember being at a meeting with Miriam Rothschild [the celebrated natural scientist], and Chris Baines was there, the TV naturalist, the guy who founded the Birmingham Wildlife Trust, and we were talking about the loss of insects in general and the loss of moths in particular, as Miriam was a great moth expert, and I said I remembered in the fifties driving from Norfolk to London with my dad, and him having to stop to wipe the windscreen and the headlights two or three times during every journey, so he could see.’ He laughed. ‘And Chris Baines said, it was all very well for you, being driven around in a flash car – for me, you couldn’t bicycle with your mouth open, because you would swallow so many insects.’
I looked up Chris Baines, and he laughed in turn, and said it was true. He said: ‘Yes, I remember it very well, having to scrape the windscreen and the headlights clear of insects, but I did also experience it on my bike. I used to cycle to Cubs or to church choir practice and you would get them in your eye, or if you had your mouth open, you ended up spitting out bits of moth wing, there were just so many in the air on any evening.’ He thought about it for a moment and he said: ‘If you drove down any kind of hollow way, like a country lane with hedges on both sides, you would be driving through a terrific mass of insects, and now that never happens. I remember it until my twenties. It’s difficult to be precise, but I was a student in Kent, at Wye College, and my recollection is that it was still the case then, in the late 1960s, but not after that, really. It certainly never happens now. We spend a lot of time in rural Wales, driving in north Wales, and there have been evenings when I have commented that we’ve seen a moth. It’s almost literally that – one or two moths in a journey. That’s a completely different kind of situation from when I was growing up.’
It was in the millennium year, 2000, that I myself began to realise that the moth snowstorm had disappeared, and I began to write about it as part of the issue of insect decline as a whole, which seemed to me to be wide-ranging and extremely serious – the honeybees and the bumblebees were declining, the beetles were disappearing, the mayflies on the rivers were plunging in numbers – but very under-appreciated: no one was interested in it. Yet every time I wrote about the snowstorm, people would respond. They would say how vividly they remembered it, and how now they never saw it, and a frequent memory was of the long drive to the coast for the summer holiday in July or August (in the fifties, Spanish beaches were still in the future) when the car windscreen would unfailingly be insect-plastered; and then it all stopped. The experts remembered it just like the members of the public. Mark Parsons, the principal moth man at Butterfly Conservation, recalled it vividly from twenty or thirty years earlier, but he said to me: ‘I may have seen it once or twice in the last decade.’
All this was just anecdotal, of course. There were no scientific figures for moth decline, as Britain’s community of naturalists, enthusiastic though they were, had never got round to creating monitoring surveys for moths like they had done for birds, wild flowers, and butterflies. It was merely memories. Then one day the figures suddenly appeared.
They came from an unexpected source: Rothamsted, the celebrated agricultural research station in Hertfordshire (the oldest agricultural research station in the world, in fact, with experiments on the effects of fertilisers on crops going back to 1843). From 1968 Rothamsted had operated, through volunteers, a nationwide network of moth traps, the data from which had been used, within the station itself, to study various aspects of insect population dynamics. But in 2001 it was perceived that one well-known, widespread and common moth, the strikingly beautiful garden tiger, appeared to be collapsing in numbers. As a result, the Rothamsted scientists began to analyse the long-term population trends of 337 larger moth species regularly caught in the traps over the full thirty-five-year period the network had been running, from 1968 to 2002. The results, made public in conjunction with Butterfly Conservation on 20 February 2006, were astounding: they showed Britain’s moth fauna to be in freefall. Wholly unsuspected in its scale, the position was even worse than that of the birds, the wild flowers, and the butterflies. Of the 337 species examined, two-thirds were declining: 80 species had declined by 70 per cent or more, and 20 of these had gone down by over 90 per cent. In southern Britain, three-quarters of moth species were tumbling in numbers; their total cumulative decline since 1968 was estimated at 44 per cent, while in urban areas, the losses were estimated at 50 per cent. The snowflakes which had made up the snowstorm were simply no longer there.
It had been the most powerful of all the manifestations of abundance, this blizzard of insects in the headlights of cars, this curious side effect of technology, this revelatory view of the natural world which was only made possible with the invention of the motor vehicle. It was extraordinary; yet even more extraordinary was the fact that it had ceased to exist. Its disappearance spoke unchallengeably of a completely unregarded but catastrophic crash in Britain of the invertebrate life which is at the basis of so much else. South Korea may have destroyed Saemangeum, and China may have destroyed its dolphin, but my own country has wreaked a destruction which is just as egregious: in my lifetime, in a process that began in the year I was born, in this great and merciless thinning, it has obliterated half its living things, even though the national consciousness does not register it yet. That has been my fate as a baby boomer: not just to belong to the most privileged generation which ever walked the earth, but, as we can at last see now, to have my life parallel the destruction of the wondrous abundance of nature that still persisted in my childhood, the abundance which sang like nothing else of the force and energy of life and could be witnessed in so many ways, but most strikingly of all in the astonishing summer night display in the headlight beams, which is no more.
*
But if we know full well why half our wildlife has gone – step forward. Farmer Giles, with your miserable panoply of poisons – the reason for the disappearance of one particular part of it, London’s sparrows, remains a mystery entirely.
How utterly bizarre that it should happen to him, the Cockney sparrer! The urban survivor par excellence! The bird that has lived alongside humans since human settlements began twelve thousand years ago… the bird which is wholly at home in the city… what is it that, in one of the world’s greatest cities where previously it flourished, has destroyed its population? To this day, more than twenty years after the event, nobody knows.
The phenomenon is all the more perplexing in that in major cities ostensibly very similar in infrastructure and atmosphere to London, such as Paris or New York or Washington, sparrows are flourishing still, darting in their flocks around the feet of the tourists in hope of the dropped crumb or the piece of ice-cream cone. Yet in Britain’s capital, over the decade of the 1990s, the population collapsed, and the birds vanished almost completely. Within the London sparrow ecosystem, something mysterious, something catastrophic, took place. But even now, no one has worked out what.
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.
And Denis had a candidate for what might be killing off the insects in towns and cities like London: motor vehicle pollution, and specifically, the introduction of lead-free petrol into Britain, in 1988; for not only did that represent the major change in the composition of vehicle exhaust fumes in previous years, but there was also a strong temporal correlation between the introduction of unleaded and the sparrow decline itself (as a couple of canny readers had noticed, in our initial trawl of ideas). At first, unleaded sold in only tiny amounts, but sales picked up rapidly during the nineties, leading to the complete phasing out of leaded petrol at the end of 1999, and the uptake clearly paralleled the London sparrows’ demise. It was the substitute chemicals added to the petrol to replace the lead and reboost the octane rating, Denis believed, which might be causing the problem, and he focused on two additives in particular: benzene and MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), both of which had health and safety question marks against them. He accepted there was no scientific evidence as yet linking MTBE or benzene directly with house sparrows, but he thought that the circumstantial evidence of a connection was strong. Hence he took the view: ‘This is my hypothesis – what’s yours?’
It was intriguing, and a potentially devastating example of the law of unintended consequences. Unfortunately, it was a hypothesis that was very hard to test, as although a highly specialised agricultural research station like Rothamsted might be uniquely equipped to measure insect biomass on farmland, nobody at all, as far as I could find out, was measuring insect biomass in towns and cities; it was seen as a near impossible job, and anyway, what would be the reasons to fund it? So you simply couldn’t tell if the aphid population of St James’s Park, say, was plummeting. I also felt there was a gaping hole in the theory: New York and Washington had unleaded just as London did, and Paris had sans plomb – so why weren’t their sparrows disappearing in the same way?
Yet Denis’s instinct that the proximate cause of the decline might be starvation of the chicks through lack of insects was eventually borne out by a young postgraduate research student at De Montfort University in Leicester, Kate Vincent. For her doctoral thesis, Kate put up more than six hundred sparrow nest boxes in the Leicester suburbs and the adjoining countryside, and monitored them for three years, closely observing the birds’ breeding success. (I visited her and watched her gamely clambering up and down her ladders.) Her finding, in 2005, was remarkable: that in the summer, completely unseen by the outside world, considerable numbers of sparrow chicks were starving to death in the nest, and the closer towards the centre of town the nest was, the higher the mortality. Furthermore, those whose diet had consisted largely of vegetable matter – seeds and scraps of bread – were much more likely to die than those whose diet had contained plenty of invertebrates. (Kate worked out the chicks’ diet by analysing their droppings: in an ornithological labour of Hercules, every time she weighed and measured a chick in the nest, she collected the poo it would tend to deposit in her hand, and then, under the microscope, she could identify in it the tiny remains of insects – an aphid leg here, a beetle mandible there – and estimate their abundance.) The chicks that were dying were largely in the sparrows’ second brood of the year: Kate found an 80 per cent success rate in the first brood, but only a 65 per cent success rate in the second, and with the birds needing between two and three broods annually to maintain their population levels, this could be enough to precipitate a decline.
Eventually, Kate wrote up her findings in a scientific paper with fellow researchers from the RSPB and English Nature (then the government’s wildlife agency), and in November 2008 this was entered for the Independent’s £5,000 prize. However, the referees were split. The problem was that Kate’s research revealed the starvation but not why the insects were hard for the birds to find: it was half a solution. One referee said, award the prize. One said, do not award the prize. And the third said, award half the prize. In the circumstances, it did not seem possible to award it. And there, to date, the matter rests.
In early 2014 I went to Guisborough again to see Denis Summers-Smith and talk the whole issue over once more, fourteen years after we had first highlighted it. I spent two enjoyable days admiring his wonderful sparrow archive of more than five thousand items, and his collection of sparrow artefacts ranging from Chinese sparrow fans to Japanese sparrow netsuke, and we talked late into the night of such subjects as, what species was Lesbia’s sparrow? (Denis thinks it was the Italian sparrow, Passer italiae, which replaces Passer domesticus in the Italian peninsula, although the Spanish sparrow, Passer hispaniolensis, also occurs in southern Italy. My friend, the academic ornithologist, Tim Birkhead, basing his view on the sound it made – ‘pipiabat,’ says Catullus, ‘it used to pipe’ – thinks it was probably a bullfinch.) And Denis told me of how his involvement with sparrows had begun, which really dated back to 6 August 1944, when he was a twenty-three-year-old captain leading his company of the 9th Cameronians in Normandy, in the race to close the Falaise gap, and a German shell landed by him and almost took off his legs. But not quite: eight operations later he still had them, and lying in hospital in Worcestershire, he became fascinated by the sparrows which came in through the windows of the ward. When he had recovered (although with legs full of shrapnel that set off airport alarms), he began his lifelong study.
He had changed his mind about unleaded petrol and MTBE, although he still believed motor vehicle pollution was to blame for the decline of sparrows in London and other urban centres; now, however, he thought that a major cause of the decline was ‘particulate’ contamination from diesel engine exhausts (essentially nanoparticles of soot that are not filtered out in the nasal passage). This may have led directly to mortality of juvenile birds, he thought.
For my part, I wanted to discuss with him the question that continued to preoccupy me: how could the house sparrow have been ‘singled out’, as it were, for disappearance? How could it vanish from St James’s Park, say, when similar songbirds such as robins and blue tits, blackbirds and wrens, still seemed to lead satisfactory lives there?
The key fact, Denis said, was that sparrows did not disperse.
I asked him what he meant.
He said: ‘They live in a small area, which they get to know very well. They spend their lives within a kilometre. They are completely sedentary, the most sedentary of all passerines. But other small birds, like blue tits or chaffinches, are unable to do this; when they leave the nest, they have to disperse. They have to move considerable distances away, to find food or new partners.’
And how did that relate to the situation in St James’s Park?
Denis said: ‘If the sparrow population in St James’s Park dies out, it will not renew itself, because no new birds will come in. But if the blue tit population dies out, other young birds, which are dispersing, will arrive.’
The implication started to dawn on me.
I said: ‘So is it possible, then, that what went wrong in the ecosystem… what made the sparrows die out… is actually affecting all species? But the other species, because they are dispersers, are able to renew their populations…’
Denis said: ‘Yes.’
‘But we can only observe the effect in sparrows, because the sparrows are the ones that can’t replace themselves…’
Denis said: ‘This is my hypothesis.’
‘So what we may actually be looking at is a disguised devastation of all these common species?’
‘Yes.’
I was dumbfounded. ‘This is completely new, Denis. Nobody’s ever said this.’
‘Well I’ve been saying it to a lot of people.’
Was it possible? That all the birds of St James’s Park died out, or failed to breed successfully, every year? But all, except the house sparrows, could renew their populations from outside?
That we had actually witnessed something far more wide-ranging than the downfall merely of Passer domesticus?
I could not say.
Whatever had done it so effectively to the sparrows, and possibly was doing it without our knowledge to all the songbirds of central London, and possibly even to more organisms than that – including us – remained unknown.
We still had no idea what it was.
*
I come from the north of England, but I have lived in London for forty years and grown to know it well and love it, and when I first realised the sparrows had gone from its heart, I felt the loss as keenly as other people did. And six months after visiting Denis, while writing this book, I was suddenly seized with a desire to go out into central London and look for them, wondering if, two decades after their disappearance, any trace of them might remain.
I approached Helen Baker, who had spotted the birds’ disappearance almost before anyone else. She had risen in the London Natural History Society and was now its president, but was as fascinated as ever by the sparrows’ fate; she was a receptacle for all the reports which surfaced from time to time, of the odd colony clinging on here and there, in quiet corners. Helen told me she thought there might be three small colonies still in central London, two of them on the South Bank, and on a hot July day we set out in search of them, meeting in the Guildhall Yard, the very hub of the old City. Helen was attending a lunchtime concert in the Guildhall church and while I waited for it to finish I watched the office workers with their sandwiches being half-heartedly hassled for crumbs by the pigeons. When I first came to London, sparrows would have been the hasslers-in-chief.
We began our South Bank search at Borough Market in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral, whose pinnacled tower Shakespeare would have eyed (the churches on the north bank all being consumed, of course, in the Great Fire of 1666). Borough Market epitomises what we might call the Mediterraneanisation of London which has taken place over recent decades – the introduction into the capital of exhilarating new foods and the enthusiasm of crowds for them and habits of eating in the open air (on a sunny day it could almost be Barcelona) – and if ever there was a place where sparrows would thrive, this was it. The local birds knew it too. But they were pigeons and lesser black-backed gulls and, I was delighted to see, a crowd of starlings; of Passer domesticus, there was no sign. There was no sign of him either as we skirted the replica of Francis Drake’s Golden Hind in St Mary Overie dock and moved up Clink Street past the medieval remains of the Bishop of Winchester’s Palace and out on to the riverbank, and the Anchor Pub. In the garden beyond the old pub, said Helen, sparrows had occasionally been seen over the previous year, and we watched and we listened for several minutes, because with sparrows you may well hear them cheeping before you see them. The only sound was the laughter of drinkers. There were no sparrows there that day.
Helen’s second potential South Bank sparrow site was another garden, further upstream at Gabriel’s Wharf, and as we walked there I was struck by the number of pigeons, especially outside Tate Modern, the power station turned temple of contemporary art on whose soaring art deco brick tower peregrine falcons – notable pigeon consumers – roosted. ‘It pleases a lot of people that peregrines eat pigeons,’ said Helen, who explained that in the school holidays she was one of the people manning the RSPB telescope trained on the tower so that the public could observe the peregrine pair who had been named Misty and Bert. I wondered how many of the pigeons I was watching would end up as peregrine dinners; they were in the sort of numbers that sparrows would once have exhibited, hundreds and hundreds of them. But there was no sign of the sparrows; not there, not anywhere along the embankment, and not at Gabriel’s Wharf either, where we thoroughly explored the garden in which Helen had in the past counted up to forty; now there were merely sixteen pigeons on the lawn. ‘Oh, this is disappointing,’ said Helen. ‘It used to be such a very good colony. It may be that the food supply has gone. They used to nest in the houses and flats nearby. One would hear them and one would see them, going back and forth from these houses.’ Not any more.
It seemed to me that London was completely sparrow-free; for the South Bank was such a tourist trap, it had so many eating places with people sitting outside dropping crumbs, that in any other European city it would be a sparrow food resource par excellence. But there were none whatsoever. It was uncanny. It was chilling, almost. The disappearance of the birds seemed complete.
Helen had one remaining site to try, which was on the north side of the river, so we walked over Waterloo Bridge and into the West End; we wound our way into a celebrated and historic area, and Helen said to be on the lookout, for birds had been seen in the street we were in, on the window boxes. ‘Look up, keep your eyes open,’ she said. I could see nothing. We turned into another street, a famous one, and she repeated her exhortation; I could still see nothing. Then, as we were passing a well-known Italian restaurant, I heard it:
Hey!
What?
You!
What?
You!
Eh?
Who?
Him.
Him?
Nah.
Her?
Nah.
Me?
Nope.
Him?
Yup.
Really?
Yup…
A flood of elation swept through me. I shouted: ‘I can hear them! I can hear them!’ Helen called out: ‘I can see them too!’
‘Where?’
‘Here they are on the wall…’
‘Oh God, yes! Suddenly! Two of them!’ – all this from my tape recorder – ‘Wow you’re right! A third one! On the flats, on the old Victorian flats!’
They might have been the rarest birds in the land, red-backed shrikes or black-winged stilts, they might have been Siberian rubythroats, such was my delight. I said to Helen: ‘I never imagined I would ever feel this way about sparrows.’
The chirping was continuous by now. We were opposite a tiny park, just a garden really, full of bushes: the chirping was coming from inside, and when we went in, we found the birds, hovering around feeders which had been placed deep into cover. It was in a very quiet part of a famous street, almost a backwater in the heart of tourist London; the birds foraged in the garden, and nested in the old flats across the road.
Just a handful of them.
Very shy, hiding in the foliage.
But there they were.