Talkback: House sparrows

Loads of sparrows in our garden, they gobble up nearly all the birdfood I put out, even the fat balls, they're certainly not dying out here!  Also bluetits, great tits, the odd robin, several blackbirds, occasional chaffinch and a fortnight ago dozens of starlings on their way back up north. The sparrows nest in every opening they can find under the roof and particularly in the virginia creeper growing over our shed. Next door neighbour has fitted special nesting boxes for swifts under the eaves. They come back every year almost on the same date. Love watching them swooping around endlessly, don't know where they get the strength from! The other day our neighbour watched a heron help himself to one of our goldfish. Luckily we have too many of them so we don't begrudge him the occasional one.

Never saw a house sparrow here for the first 20 odd years after I arrived.  A couple appeared about three years ago and today I saw 4 or 5 in the garden. I'm glad they've arrived but was miffed to find that my yellow crocus flowers had been devoured. Pretty sure it was the spadgers, they always ate my mum's yellow crocuses. 

Don't talk to me about crows, they sit on neighbours roof and screech their heads off. The noise goes right through you! In fact they've become such a plague eating all the grain here that farmers are getting permission to shoot them. In a way I feel sorry for them, they can't help the way they are, can they?

Crow pie yum yum yum yum

Hugh whittingstall he eats slugs and snails too .

Derek

Thanks for all your comments! Interesting to see lots of different views of the house sparrow. I've never seen one in my garden.

Kate

 we have about thirty around the flats where i live.

three  of us regularly feed them. and put out water.

What I like about sparrows most is when I see them flitting around my plants, clreaning them of aphids!  For some reason they don't like blackfly though, so still have to keep an eye on the broad beans and dahlias, which the blackfly seem to prefer.  Had a host of around 50 house sparrows in 2011, but a sparrowhawk started to regularly appear and was down to about 20 last year.  The most I've seen visiting my feeders at any one time this winter/spring was about 8, but hopefully numbers will rise agin once the breeding season starts.

The sound of housesparrows in the eaves of the farmhouse where I grew up is one of the strongest memories of my childhood, as are the images of them scuttering around in dustbaths in the dried dust of the farmyard in summer.  They were very numerous and hoovered up the inevitable spillages of grain at harvest time.  

Then they seemed to disappear from my life until I moved to my previous house in a Victorian terraced street where most of the roofs were of traditional pantiles - a neighbour was very keen on birds and had shrubs growing right up his windows and a flock of noisy sparrows spent their days in his cotoneaster and nested in his roof.

Now we've moved here and our new neighbour's roof provides a nesting site for house sparrows and starlings, and their chatter fills my days again 

I think alot of the disapearing wildlife is due to the way we are living our lives.Roof extentions are everywhere as are gravel and bricked over front gardens where no hedgehog can live or birds in the cold sterile surroundings.I like tidy garden but to have one perfect and no wild over patches is a bad thing for wildlife,along with our interferences with the natures chain.