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Garden Birds

Of all Britain’s birds, one particular group has risen to the very top of our affections – those that have chosen to live alongside us, in our gardens. These have become the most familiar, the most loved and, in some cases, the most hated of our birds. In some ways they define our relationship with Britain’s birdlife, as birder and broadcaster Bill Oddie points out: ‘For many people there is nothing but garden birds – the only birds they actually see are in their garden!’

It’s hardly surprising we are so obsessed with garden birds, for they perform a daily soap opera outside our back window; a soap opera whose characters reflect our own attitudes, prejudices and emotions.

These are our most familiar birds: those we see every day and interact with most in our lives. Not surprisingly, this has engendered a very deep and intimate relationship between us and the natural world, as David Attenborough reflects:

No matter how small your garden is, there will be a bird that comes to it. And they bring a breath of the natural world, the non-human world, and they’re the one thing that does. They’re also magical, in that they suddenly take off and disappear and you’ve no idea where they’ve gone – yet they come back again.

And yet our relationship with garden birds is a surprisingly modern one. It is the result of some of the most dramatic changes in British society in the last hundred and fifty years.

* * *

We are a nation of gardeners who have become a nation of garden-bird lovers. Our long and cherished relationship with our gardens is clear from the huge popularity of television and radio programmes such as Gardeners’ World and Gardeners’ Question Time, as well as the plethora of gardening magazines on sale in our newsagents. This has undoubtedly helped to influence and define our relationship with the birds that live alongside us.

Today, two out of three of us feed wild birds in our gardens, spending over £150 million pounds a year in the process. This relationship brings a mutual benefit, whereby the birds are fed, and we are entertained by watching them. And for many people, this simple act of kindness to our fellow creatures is the entry point into a deeper relationship with wildlife as a whole; a relationship that may span their entire lifetime.

Yet only a century ago, most of us did not even have gardens. We took little interest in the welfare of our feathered neighbours, and were more likely to eat a Blackbird than to feed it. The very concept of ‘garden birds’ was meaningless – as environmental historian Rob Lambert points out, the term hadn’t even been invented: ‘“Garden birds” is a cultural construct – these are simply birds that have taken advantage of the new suburban landscapes we have created. These are birds of the woodland edge that have moved into what we have defined as “gardens”.’

As the landscape of Britain changed, so birds that had evolved to live in our woods and forests – tits, thrushes, woodpeckers and many more – found sanctuary in our gardens. They were joined by birds of more open countryside – finches, pigeons and doves – that also exploited the plentiful opportunities for food, shelter and nesting places in our backyards.

As the wider countryside became less and less suitable for birds, due to the intensification of agriculture and the resulting loss of habitat, so gardens became the prime habitat for many of these species – effectively turning them from woodland and farmland birds into what we now call ‘garden birds’.

So in little more than a century, an extraordinary transformation has taken place in our relationship with the birds that live alongside us. This domestic drama runs parallel to the history and development of that very British phenomenon, the modern suburban garden. But it’s a story that begins ten thousand years ago, when one adaptable little bird sought out our company for the very first time: the House Sparrow.

* * *

The House Sparrow is often taken for granted, but it is a particular favourite of birder and broadcaster Tony Soper: ‘It’s a small, chunky little bird, with wonderful chestnuts and browns – in a drab sort of way it’s a very colourful bird. But mostly what’s good about the sparrow is its behaviour – the cheeky “cockney spadger”!’

House Sparrows have lived alongside humans longer than any other wild bird – since our prehistoric ancestors first abandoned their hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favour of farming, leading to a more settled way of life, as Mark Cocker explains:

The sparrow’s engagement with us is peculiarly intimate, and is rooted in the development of agriculture. Agriculture is thought to have originated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and House Sparrows probably spread across Europe, as agriculture was spread from community to community. And as they moved, they found a way to live beside us.

Sparrows found nest sites on our homes and food in our fields and farmyards. Indeed they are now only found in and around human settlements, and have spread, via deliberate and accidental introductions, across much of the globe. Today the familiar chirp of the House Sparrow can be heard in towns and cities in North and South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand; and in many of these places they have exploited vacant ecological niches to the detriment of native species.

But in the view of Denis Summers-Smith, an amateur ornithologist who has studied sparrows for more than sixty years, their very dependence on us meant that we viewed them with suspicion from the outset: ‘Sparrows, from very early on, were regarded as pests, because they fed on the cereal crops the farmers were growing.’

By the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, in the second half of the sixteenth century, sparrows had a price put on their heads, thanks to the passing of an Act of Parliament branding them as agricultural pests. As a result, people would take the head of each sparrow to the parish church where they’d be paid a small bounty.

Since that time, farming communities all over Britain have waged war on sparrows to safeguard their crops. Mark Cocker believes that this has had long-term consequences, helping to define our current relationship with this familiar little bird: ‘One of the interesting things about sparrows is that they’ve never really lost a shyness, a difficulty of approach, in the way that Blue Tits and Robins have lost their fear of us… And I think that’s to do with the way that because they ate grain they were harvested and eaten.’

But it’s not all that easy to catch such a clever bird – so in the seventeenth century our ancestors turned to the Netherlands for a practical solution, according to Denis Summers-Smith:

Dutch engineers who had come over to drain the Fens brought with them what were known as ‘sparrow-pots’. These were put up on farm buildings, primarily to prevent the sparrows nesting in the thatch; but also, because they were on a hook, they could be lifted off. The housewife could put her hand in the back and remove either the sparrows or the eggs, and these would very often go into a pot in the kitchen.

The number of tiny eggs required to make a decent omelette, or birds to make a pie, might appear hardly worth the trouble of collecting or catching them. Yet it must have been worthwhile, as this practice continued far longer than we might imagine – sparrows were caught and eaten in the countryside until the middle of the twentieth century.

But some Britons had already begun to take a very different view of this little bird, as a result of the biggest social change in British history. This was the wholesale migration of millions of people from the countryside into the towns, to meet the increased need for labour in factories required by the Industrial Revolution. Rural historian Jeremy Burchardt regards this as a key turning-point in the history of our nation:

In the nineteenth century the balance of population between rural England and urban England changed quite dramatically. In the early nineteenth century the great majority of people lived in the countryside; by 1900 only about one in five people did. So we had effectively changed from being a rural nation into being an urban nation in the space of a few generations.

Given how dependent House Sparrows were on humans, it’s not surprising that, as we moved into towns, they were the one bird that came along with us. They were partly able to do so because, as historian Jenny Uglow explains, the differences between urban and rural areas were not all that great:

One aspect to the growing cities is that they were still terribly close to the country; not just physically, but the fact that there were a lot of agricultural animals actually in the city. You had horses everywhere, you had stables, and also in the parks – like in St James’s Park in London – there were cows, there were sheep. So those birds which thrive on dung and seeds like the sparrow could find the city quite a happy home.

Arguably sparrows enjoyed better living conditions in Victorian cities than did much of the human population. Denis Summers-Smith notes that these newly built dwellings created to house the growing human population provided safe for the birds too: places to nest, where they were safe from attack by birds of prey and cats.

But the other reason for the success of sparrows in our towns and cities was a change in our attitude towards them. People rather welcomed the presence of this little bird, which perhaps reminded them of their ancestral home.

The townsfolk’s new-found affection for sparrows was undoubtedly a reaction to urbanisation – a disorientating process that cut millions of Britons off from wild nature, and at the same time made them nostalgic for their rural past. This was the start of a very new way of looking at the ‘countryside’ – not as a place where people lived and worked, but as a rural idyll of peace and harmony. This view would later come to define the relationship between town and country – a relationship that persists even today.

Meanwhile, back in the ever-growing cities of the Victorian era, the working classes and the urban poor found themselves living in densely packed housing with little if any outdoor space, and no trees or greenery. But they found one way to reconnect with the birds of the countryside – not outside the home, but within it.

* * *

Like us, the Victorians were obsessed with birds. Unlike us, they preferred to keep them in cages, rather than watch them in the wild. The cagebird craze became a big part of domestic life, and as well as what historian of science Helen Macdonald calls ‘the usual suspects’ – Canaries and Budgerigars – the Victorians also kept a very wide range of British species, including Wheatears and thrushes, as well as more typical cagebirds such as finches.

These birds were trapped in vast numbers – tens of thousands were caught at popular sites such as the South Downs in Sussex – and sold in London markets such as Club Row in London’s East End. They were caught using a variety of ingenious methods: smearing branches and twigs of trees with ‘bird-lime’ (a glutinous substance made from, amongst other things, holly bark), and by using large nets, which were laid out onto the ground and triggered by pulling a piece of string. Decoy birds were often tethered next to the nets, as a way of luring wild birds in. Spring and autumn were the main bird-catching seasons, as they coincided with the seasonal migrations of the birds.

The Victorian journalist and social reformer Henry Mayhew, who in 1851 wrote London Labour and the London Poor, made a special study of the bird-catchers. He reported that the majority of birds caught were Linnets, an attractive little finch with a sweet and melodious song. Up to 70,000 Linnets a year were being trapped, and sold for three or four pence each – though mature birds with particularly good songs could be sold for as much as half-a-crown (about £12 at today’s values). Goldfinches were also popular, and sold for between sixpence and one shilling a head – equivalent to a few pounds today. For the people involved in bird-catching, it must have been a profitable trade.

The Linnet’s widespread popularity as a cagebird was celebrated in the lyrics of the popular music-hall hit, ‘My Old Man’, written by Charles Collins and Fred Leigh:

My old man said ‘follow the van,

And don’t dilly dally on the way!’

Off went the van with my old man in it,

I walked behind with me old cock linnet…

A more literary example can be found in Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House, in which one memorable scene, also shown in the BBC television adaptation in 2005, dramatises the Victorian passion for cagebirds. One character, old Miss Flite, is embroiled in a long-running court case, but takes comfort in her collection of birds in cages, which she vows to release once the case is finally settled.

Cagebirds weren’t kept for purely aesthetic reasons, but because they brought a reminder of the Victorian city-dwellers’ rural past into their homes, according to Jenny Uglow: ‘The song of the bird was like the music of the country; and you could close your eyes, and listen to the bird sing, and be transported back to the countryside that you came from. For people in the city, the wild bird becomes an emblem of the freedom they have lost.’

To our modern sensibilities, the notion that birds in cages could be symbols of freedom may seem bizarre. And indeed for some time there had been growing numbers of people objecting to the practice, including the poet and reformer William Blake. In ‘Auguries of Innocence’, written in the early nineteenth century but not published until 1863, he unequivocally condemns bird-keeping, in a celebrated couplet:

A robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all heaven in a rage.

According to the historian Keith Thomas, author of Man and the Natural World, wild birds were often invoked as symbols of an Englishman’s freedom, while a growing movement objected to the cruelty involved – not simply imprisoning the birds, but also blinding them, a common practice supposed to improve the quality of their song. But the trade continued, and as Jenny Uglow points out, for many Victorians keeping birds in cages was not regarded as cruel in any way. She cites contemporary accounts of species such as Goldfinches being happy in their cage, and appearing to sing more frequently than they did in the wild.

Not surprisingly, the most popular cagebirds were those with the most attractive song, including the Nightingale, justly famed as the greatest and most varied of all our native songsters. But this insectivorous bird would have been very tricky to keep and look after as a cagebird, as Tim Birkhead, author of The Wisdom of Birds, explains: ‘The Nightingale was a very difficult bird to keep in captivity, requiring live food such as worms and insects, and as a result having very wet droppings, so you had to go to a lot of trouble to keep it – both to feed it and to keep it clean.’

Fed up with the problems of keeping such a fussy bird, the Victorians looked around for a more convenient alternative. They found it not in a wild British bird, but in an imported exotic species, the Canary which, as Tim Birkhead puts it, ‘knocked the Nightingale off its perch’.

* * *

But whether exotic or British, caged birds served another purpose beyond their song and attractive appearance. Birds in cages were regarded by the Victorians as excellent examples of moral instruction, especially as a way of teaching children, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘If you had a pair of Canaries in a cage, and they were breeding, you could see “mum and dad” feeding the chicks – they were, in a way, like a model human couple.’

Because the Victorians believed birds paired for life, unlike many other creatures, the Christian Church had singled them out for special attention. One clergyman was particularly influential in shaping attitudes to birds at this time. Tony Soper notes: ‘The Reverend Francis Orpen Morris was typical of the clergy of his day, in that he regarded all bird life as moral creatures from which we had to learn.’

F. O. Morris, as he is generally known, was one of the great Victorian popularisers of birds. In his long life – he lived more than eighty years – he published numerous books on many and varied subjects, including British birds. His most celebrated work, A History of British Birds, appeared from 1851 to 1857.

Like many Victorian works, both of fiction and non-fiction, A History of British Birds was published in regular ‘partworks’ costing a shilling each, which made it accessible to a very wide audience. Eventually bound into six hefty volumes, it was subsequently reprinted at regular intervals, and even today hand-coloured plates from this work can be found in antique shops all over the country.

Popular, the Reverend Morris’s work may certainly have been; accurate and informative it was not. This damning verdict, written in 1917 by ornithological bibliographers Mullens and Swann, is fairly typical:

Of this it may be said that, although one of the most voluminous and popular works on the subject, and financially most successful (thousands of pounds having been made out of successive editions), yet it has never occupied any very important position among the histories of British birds. Morris was too voluminous to be accurate, and too didactic to be scientific. He accepted records and statements without discrimination, and consequently his work abounds with errors and mistakes.

Their verdict isn’t entirely negative, and acknowledges that popularity has its virtues: ‘Yet as a book for amateur ornithologists it has charmed and delighted for more than half a century, and it had for many years the great merit of being almost the only work at a moderate price to give a fairly accurate and coloured figure of every species.’

But like so many Victorian clergymen who used nature as a way of teaching morals to their flock, Morris’s lack of a basic understanding of biology let him down – in his case, very badly indeed. For amongst his favourite birds – and one he frequently invoked as an example to his parishioners and readers – was the Hedge Sparrow, now known as the Dunnock.

Despite its superficial resemblance to the House Sparrow, the Dunnock is in fact completely unrelated to that species. It is the only common and widespread representative in Britain of a small family known as the accentors: mostly birds of high mountains and rocky slopes, found entirely in the temperate regions of Europe and Asia. Its name, dating back to the fifteenth century, simply means ‘little brown bird’.

Dunnocks are rather retiring birds, easy to overlook, as Tony Soper notes: ‘The Dunnock is a shy little bird, a reclusive little bird, that walks around the bottom of the bird table picking up the crumbs. And yet it’s one of these birds that, when you get a really good, close-up look at it, has a really fine plumage, with pinkish legs and a nice little thin bill.’

It was this shyness and modesty that appealed so strongly to the Reverend Morris, as Tim Birkhead points out: ‘Humble in its behaviour, drab and sober in its dress, this was the perfect model for how all his parishioners should behave.’

But then again, the Reverend Morris didn’t know the truth about the Dunnock. As Jeremy Mynott, author of Birdscapes, notes, the sex life of this species is truly extraordinary: ‘It enters into every relationship possible: polygamy, polygyny, polyandry, promiscuity… you name it, the Dunnock does it!’

Sometime during the early part of the year, just as the days begin to lengthen, male Dunnocks leave their hiding places in the shrubbery and are miraculously transformed from shy wall-flowers into loud, self-confident show-offs.

Usually sitting in full view on a hedge, tree or fence post, the male sings his rather flat, tuneless song from dawn to dusk. Like any other songbird at this time of the year, he’s trying to attract a mate. Unlike many other birds, he won’t be content with just one.

Having formed a pair-bond with a female, the male Dunnock spends much of the day following her doggedly around – demonstrating the apparently faithful behaviour that so appealed to Morris. But he’s not doing this out of devotion, but jealousy; because every female Dunnock is keeping half an eye out for a neighbouring male – a rival to her mate. If she can shake off his attentions for a moment or two she will mate with the other male, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘Dunnocks, instead of breeding as a conventional pair, often breed as a trio: two males paired simultaneously with one female. The female wants both males to mate with her, because if both males mate with her they will both help to rear her chicks.’

Despite her mate’s obsessive guarding, we know that the female Dunnock does often manage to mate with another male. Clutches of Dunnock’s eggs from the same nest have been examined, revealing that the chicks may have several different fathers. The male isn’t always the victim – even while he is devotedly feeding his first brood, he may well sneak off and feed another set of chicks in a nest nearby.

It is thought that this extraordinarily complex breeding strategy evolved because there are normally far fewer female Dunnocks than male ones, which allows them to have the upper hand.

This scandalous behaviour was only revealed in the 1990s, by a group of scientists in Cambridge, led by Professor Nick Davies. It was first shown to a wider public in 1998, in the BBC series The Life of Birds, presented by David Attenborough. Viewers were astonished to see the means by which the first male tries to make sure that his sperm fertilises the female, so that the chicks will be his. As Tim Birkhead points out, his first line of defence is to copulate at an incredible rate – up to one hundred times in a single day. But the male Dunnock has another trick up his sleeve.

Using slow-motion film cameras and a lot of time, skill and patience, wildlife cameraman Barrie Britton eventually managed to capture the split-second moment at which the male – knowing that the female has already mated with his rival – pecks persistently at her cloaca until she expels a packet of sperm from the other male. Only then does the first male actually ‘do the business’. It’s a case of ‘blink and you’ll miss it’, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘As the droplet of sperm comes out he looks at it, and then copulates with her. The other thing that’s absolutely remarkable is that those copulations in the Dunnock are so fast – it’s about a tenth of a second, which must be almost the fastest bird copulation there is. He basically just flies over her…’

So in choosing the Dunnock as such a fine example of morality and fidelity, the Reverend Francis Orpen Morris could hardly have got it more wrong. As Tony Soper remarks: ‘I’m afraid that the only moral you can draw from them is “every man for himself !”’

Presumably if the Reverend Morris knew what we know today about the Dunnock, he would be turning in his grave.

* * *

Morality was not the only aspect of Victorian culture shaping our fledgling relationship with the birdlife in our towns and gardens. The rapidly growing humane movement also played an important role, by campaigning for compassionate treatment of all God’s creatures. At the centre of this urban mass movement were children’s humane societies, such as the RSPCA’s Band of Mercy, and the Dicky Bird Society, founded in 1876 by W. E. Adams.

William Edwin Adams was a truly extraordinary man. His life story is a classic Victorian tale of endeavour, persistence and sacrifice in the service of others. Born in 1832, in Cheltenham, to poor, working-class parents, Adams became one of the leading social reformers of his day. After leaving school at fourteen, Adams began work as a journeyman printer, and then became a journalist, writing mainly on the burning social issues of his day, and getting involved in the new political movement of socialism.

In 1862, at the age of thirty, Adams had a stroke of luck. Asked to contribute a column to the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, two years later he became its editor, a post he held for more than a third of a century, until he retired in 1900.

By then, Adams had become heavily involved in the movement to educate children in a more humane way, and so he began a newspaper column under the pseudonym ‘Uncle Toby’, dispensing advice to young readers. In 1876, he founded the Dicky Bird Society, aimed at encouraging humane behaviour towards animals in children.

A key aspect of this behaviour was feeding wild birds, and this was included in the pledge taken by new members of the Dicky Bird Society: ‘I hereby promise to be kind to all living things, to protect them to the utmost of my power, to feed the birds in the winter-time, and never to take or destroy a nest.’

Today we take feeding birds for granted, but in Victorian times it was quite unusual, even in towns and cities. By encouraging children to feed wild birds, the Dicky Bird Society, and others like it, promoted a pastime that would go on to forge a lasting bond between the British people and what would eventually become our ‘garden birds’.

The Dicky Bird Society was a highly successful organisation, which continued to run until 1940, attracting hundreds of thousands of children throughout the country, and gaining public support from such Victorian luminaries as John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Florence Nightingale. Together with other children’s humane organisations they could boast millions of members, some of whom came from surprising places, according to social historian Frederick Milton, who has made a special study of the society: ‘There is a letter written to the Dicky Bird Society from children in Dover workhouse, which tells Uncle Toby that they were collecting crumbs from their table to feed to the birds the next day.’

As Frederick Milton notes, this eagerness to engage with feeding birds was not confined to children living in poverty: ‘As the nineteenth century progressed, the number of people actually feeding the birds visibly increased. There was a brand-new generation of individuals who were far more interested in garden birds and their welfare.’

But not everyone in Victorian society thought it necessary, or indeed desirable, to feed birds, as Rob Lambert explains:

The Victorians were caught up in a massive ethical dilemma about feeding garden birds. On the one hand, Victorian values and society were dominated by the concept of ‘Self-Help’ [the title of a book and movement led by Samuel Smiles] – you had to look after yourself, and couldn’t depend on the state for welfare and support in hard times. And they extended this moral code onto the birdlife, so therefore the Victorians believed that by feeding the garden birds, you somehow made them indolent, lazy, and dependent on welfare.

These attitudes would be changed by a series of very hard winters, which pushed birds to the edge of starvation. In particular the winter of 1890–1 saw long spells of ice and snow, and national newspapers began to urge their readers to feed the birds. In the centre of London, the nature writer W. H. Hudson witnessed working men giving scraps from their meagre supplies of food. As Rob Lambert points out, this coincided with a shift in attitudes in the country as a whole:

Victorian Britain was also dominated by these emerging new sensibilities; by this wave of humanitarianism that developed decade by decade, which was extremely powerful. And the Victorians couldn’t bear to see suffering, so when hard winters kicked in, and birds began to die in Victorian gardens, there was then a battle for control over the Victorian mind – and in the end it was the humanitarianism that won, and the Victorians fed their garden birds in times of great peril.

A major winner from this change in attitudes towards feeding birds was the Robin. This had already become firmly established as the nation’s favourite bird, according to cultural historian Christopher Frayling:

There’s a very rich folklore for the Robin that goes way back – for example where did the Robin gets its red breast? It got its red breast because it plucked a thorn from the crown of thorns – as Jesus was on his way to Gethsemane, a drop of Jesus’s blood falls onto the bird, and thereafter the Robin has a red breast. So it’s associated in a very deep way with the New Testament. So Robins, by Shakespeare’s time, and possibly long before that, are associated with charity and piety.

Historian Keith Thomas notes that the Robin was accorded almost supernatural powers, as in this seventeenth-century poem penned by Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle:

Man superstitiously dares not hurt me,

For if I’m killed or hurt, ill luck shall be.

Robins were also associated with death: if one tapped on a window or came into a house, it was thought that one of the occupants would soon die. Given that Robins would frequently appear on the doorstep in search of food, especially during harsh winter weather, this belief may seem rather odd – but perhaps it marks the unseen boundary between regarding this endearing little bird as a ‘wild pet’, and not allowing it to cross over the boundary into our domestic lives.

Whatever the ambiguities of our relationship with the Robin, by the Victorian era its position in our popular culture had become even more deeply entrenched. Jeremy Mynott tells the complex story behind our present-day association of Robins with Christmas, which arose in the middle of the nineteenth century:

Robins appear on Christmas cards through a rather strange process of causation. Robins gave their name to the first postmen, who wore red tunics, and were therefore called ‘robins’. And on some of the early Christmas cards delivered by these postmen, the Robin was often pictured with a postcard in its mouth, delivering the letter like a postman. So the Robin gave its name to the postman, and the postman gave his role to the Robin.

Another obvious reason for the connection of Robins with the festive season is that they often come into gardens in search of food, especially during spells of ice and snow. But whatever the reason, every year since, highly sentimental images of Robins have appeared on our Christmas cards, an annual renewal of our commitment to them.

* * *

By the start of the twentieth century the foundations of today’s special relationship with the birds living alongside us had already been laid. Although we didn’t yet call them ‘garden birds’, a growing number of people regarded these wild creatures with a sentimentality that would have been inconceivable to their rural ancestors. But this developing picture of harmony was about to be severely tested, with the coming of the First World War.

In August 1914, within days of the outbreak of the conflict, the Defence of the Realm Act was passed. This draconian piece of legislation outlawed many activities, and amendments to the Act later included the wastage of food. Almost overnight, feeding garden birds became illegal, and people were even prosecuted for doing so, including an elderly woman living in Surrey, Sophia Stuart.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, she appeared at Woking Crown Court, charged with the offence of giving bread to wild birds. In her defence, the poor woman stated that she had lost her only son, who had been killed fighting in Mesopotamia; that all she used were the dirty bottom crusts she could not eat. Moreover, she maintained that she had fed the birds for seventy years – and would continue to do so, whatever the court decided.

For this small act of defiance, she was fined two guineas – the equivalent of several hundred pounds today. For Britain’s garden birds, as well as its people, the world had certainly changed for the worse.

The war also cut off supplies of nestboxes, which had been imported from Germany by the RSPB and had proved very popular with householders. The inventor of the nestbox, Baron Hans von Berlepsch, had even been granted the position of ‘Honorary Fellow’ by the RSPB, in recognition of what he had done to help conserve Britain’s birds. The coming of war between Britain and Germany put paid to this fine example of Anglo-German co-operation, and as a result our birds had to revert to finding natural nest sites.

One familiar species wasn’t simply deprived of food and nesting sites, but became one of the first casualties of war on the Home Front. House Sparrows had long been persecuted in the countryside because they ate grain, thereby depriving farmers of part of their harvest. But now people in cities, towns and suburbs also became concerned about the threat they posed to the nation’s food supply, so they joined ‘sparrow clubs’. These organisations may sound benevolent, but they had a very sinister aim, according to Mark Cocker:

The sparrow club was a way of dealing with this urban and suburban ‘vermin species’. It involved a cluster of working-class people who would bring in their tallies from the sparrows they had killed in their allotment or their garden, and the person who had killed the greatest number of sparrows would win a silver cup for that year.

One poster, issued by the grandly named Bedfordshire War Agricultural Executive Committee, reveals the rewards available for those who were prepared to catch and kill sparrows, just as their ancestors had done in Elizabethan times. Bounties offered by the local parish council were a penny for a dozen sparrows’ eggs, tuppence for a dozen unfledged sparrows, and threepence for a dozen fledged ones – which meant that a skilled collector could amass a tidy sum given that, at the time, a pint of beer would have cost about sixpence. Rats provided an even higher reward: as much as two shillings per dozen, though they were presumably harder to catch.

The methods used to catch the sparrows themselves varied considerably, from large nets to specially made cane traps advertised in catalogues. These inevitably caught all sorts of other small birds in the process, as those doing the catching weren’t always either very expert or discriminating. And once caught, the birds weren’t all immediately killed, as Frederick Milton explains: ‘They were taken to gentleman’s clubs or to pubs, where they were then used as targets for trap-shooting.’

Ironically, the actions of the sparrow clubs may have themselves contributed to food shortages, as they did not take into account the beneficial effects sparrows had on killing harmful pests such as insects, especially during the spring when the adult birds were feeding their young.

And ultimately, even though hundreds of thousands of sparrows were killed by sparrow clubs during the war, it may all have been in vain. Because the culls took place in late summer – at the end of the breeding season, when numbers were at their peak – the killing appears to have had very little impact on the overall population.

Ironically, it was what we did in peacetime that would bring about a collapse in sparrow numbers. During the 1920s and 1930s, the coming of motor vehicles meant the end for the main form of urban transport since people had first moved into cities: the horse. The internal combustion engine – in private cars, buses and taxicabs – soon triumphed. Horse-drawn transport rapidly began to vanish from our city streets.

And with it went our old friend – and occasional enemy – the House Sparrow. City sparrows had long depended on horse feed and undigested seeds in horse droppings for food. So the replacement of horses by cars and buses deprived them of a vital resource. Sparrow expert Denis Summers-Smith believes that this marked the start of the House Sparrow’s long, slow decline – a decline which, as we shall discover, continues today.

* * *

Without even trying, we had reduced the numbers of the House Sparrow – the original garden bird – forever. But for many other garden birds, as for many householders, the period between the two world wars would see the dawn of a golden age – the start of what Christopher Frayling calls ‘the garden bird phenomenon’: ‘If you read books about birds in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no one talks about “garden birds”. It goes with the growth of suburbia.’

And grow suburbia certainly did. In just two decades, from 1920 to 1939, four million new homes were built across Britain, many of them in the ‘new towns’ such as Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City and Stevenage, on the outskirts of London; others in the suburbs of the capital itself. Moreover, for the first time in our nation’s history, the vast majority of these had proper gardens. Jenny Uglow believes that this came down to large-scale planning at a national level: ‘First of all there was the planning of new suburbs, with wider roads and trees, and long gardens. It’s the continuation of a passionate Victorian idea, that we must live close to nature, in order to live a good quality of life, and to be fully human.’

The interwar housing boom was the biggest garden creation scheme ever seen. Collectively, these new gardens provided a whole new man-made habitat for the birds to colonise. But it took some time for us to appreciate the wider ecological benefits this would bring – a network of ‘mini-habitats’ creating a much greater whole than the sum of the individual parts, as Mark Cocker notes: ‘The importance of gardens in cities is classically revealed if you have an aerial photograph, where you rise up above, and instead of the gardens being separate, discrete, unimportant scraps of land around each house, they form an aggregate of “semi-woodland” habitats that are actually very important, and often support a substantial diversity of birds.’ Today, gardens cover more than one million acres in area – bigger than all our nature reserves put together – and provide a vital haven for many species of songbird that would otherwise be in serious trouble, because of what is happening in the wider countryside.

The creation of the modern suburban garden during the 1920s and 1930s set the stage on which the relationship between homeowners and garden birds would play out over the rest of the twentieth century. And one species would lead the way: that quintessential garden bird, the Robin.

* * *

No other British bird inspires quite the same affection as the Robin. Indeed the name itself is actually a nickname – just as our ancestors referred to the ‘Jenny Wren’ and ‘Tom Tit’, so the bird officially known as the ‘Redbreast’ acquired the prefix ‘Robin Redbreast’. Gradually the second part of this was dropped, and today we use only the nickname for this familiar little bird.

Part of our great affection for the Robin stems from their confiding behaviour, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘Having a wild bird like a Robin come and alight on your hand to feed really does help to form a bond between us and them, and just makes them incredibly popular.’

And their fondness for earthworms has engendered a very special relationship with gardeners, as Mark Cocker attests: ‘For anybody who is turning over soil, from the gravedigger to the lady digging her rose bed, the Robin’s cupboard love will triumph, and they’ll attend your operations with great care!’

We now know that long before human beings came along, Robins would carefully follow large animals, especially those that dig for food, such as wild boars, in order to grab a worm or two. In Britain, where these bigger mammals had mostly disappeared, the Robin transferred its affections to human beings; whereas on the European mainland, the Robin remains a shy, woodland bird.

But despite the Robin being a very common and familiar species in Britain, even by the 1930s most aspects of its behaviour were virtually unknown. This was all to change when, for the very first time in the long and intimate relationship between us and Robins, one man decided to delve a little deeper into the bird’s behaviour.

His name was David Lack, and he would go on to become one of our leading ornithologists. He pioneered the new science of population biology, notably through his detailed studies of a fascinating group of birds found on the Galapagos Islands, known as Darwin’s finches. He was also, for more than a quarter of a century, Director of the prestigious Edward Grey Institute for Field Ornithology in Oxford. But in the early 1930s, after leaving Cambridge University, he had followed a more humble calling: taking a job as a schoolmaster at Dartington College, Devon.

One of the most abundant birds in the school grounds was the Robin, and Lack decided to make a study of this common and, as was thought, familiar bird. What he discovered would change the way we regarded the Robin forever.

Lack pioneered a simple but highly effective research method that is so commonly used today it is taken for granted. So that he could identify each bird, and work out the implications of every aspect of their day-to-day behaviour, he trapped all the Robins in the area, and gave them individual colour rings.

One of his first discoveries pulled the rug from under the cherished idea that each of us has a particular Robin returning to our garden, year after year – as Lack found, most Robins live for a year or two, at most. In 1943, a decade after he began his research, Lack published his findings in a slim volume, The Life of the Robin. As a young birdwatcher growing up in Plymouth, just down the road from Dartington, Tony Soper recalls his amazement on first reading the book: ‘I was absolutely knocked out by the realisation that the Robin we had in the garden was not the same Robin we had last week, or the week before; and certainly not the same Robin as the year before!’

The Robin’s traditional reputation was further undermined by the next part of Lack’s research. Many years later, in 1969, the BBC wildlife documentary The Private Life of the Robin revealed Lack’s findings in all their colourful, gory detail to an amazed audience.

Lack had discovered that unlike most birds, which use colour primarily to attract a mate, the Robin’s red breast has a very different purpose. It has been described as ‘war paint’ – used to drive away any rival entering the Robin’s territory.

To prove that this was the case, Lack carried out a simple but highly effective experiment. He placed a dead, stuffed Robin in a prominent position in a male Robin’s territory, then stood back to see what would happen. To his astonishment, the territory holder viciously attacked the stuffed bird, pecking repeatedly at its head, and pulling off whole clumps of feathers with its bill. As the commentary of The Private Life of the Robin put it, ‘our pretty robin redbreast turns out to be a very belligerent fellow.’

Lack’s book on Robin behaviour became a surprise bestseller. The Life of the Robin also inspired a new generation of naturalists, including David Attenborough: ‘The notion that you could take one species and write a whole book in which you dealt with territory, song, behavioural postures, and so on, was a revelation – and as far as I know this was the first time that one particular bird was given that kind of intensive treatment.’

It is more than half a century since David Lack unmasked the Robin as a short-lived, feisty little bird. And yet in many ways, despite Lack’s revelations, the sentimental Victorian image of it persists today, as Mark Cocker notes: ‘There’s this curious disconnect between our notion of the “friendly Robin” – the bird that we love, the bird of our garden, the bird on our Christmas cards – that is entwined with notions of being British. And on the other hand there’s the real Robin!’

By the time The Life of the Robin was published, Britain had been at war again for four long years. And as garden historian Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall notes, the British garden was being completely redesigned as part of the war effort: ‘As far as the garden was concerned, the Ministry of Food realised there was an enormous unused land resource right there, in people’s gardens. And the top priority was to produce as much food, at home, as we possibly could.’

The Dig for Victory campaign was instigated soon after the start of the war. Run by the charismatic Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, the campaign instructed people to convert their flower-beds into vegetable patches, so that they could produce their own food to supplement their meagre rations. This helped reduce dependence on imported food, whose supplies had swiftly dried up because of the hostilities.

Posters, pamphlets and memorable government propaganda films on cinema newsreels all helped to spread the minister’s message:

You may not be lucky enough to own an ideal kitchen garden like this, but a flowerbed will grow beetroots just as well as begonias, and there may be room for vegetables on top of the Anderson Shelter, or in your backyard, or even on that flat roof – and surely, isn’t an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?

Home-grown fruit and vegetables may have helped to liven up monotonous wartime rations but they also proved attractive to birds. And for the second time in a generation, garden birds discovered we were fickle friends, as Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall recalls: ‘The birds did of course become the gardener’s enemy, in a much stronger way when your diet depended on protecting your crops from the birds. Gardeners always have had – and especially at this time – a love-hate relationship with the birds of the garden.’

So people came up with ingenious strategies to keep birds off their precious fruit and veg, including home-made nets created from wooden sticks and cotton thread. But unlike the situation in the First World War that had given rise to the sparrow clubs, this time the government recognised that birds played a vital role in killing agricultural pests, so there were no longer calls for wholesale culls.

Nevertheless, birds continued to suffer: at a time when many people were close to starving themselves, they were hardly likely to put out waste food for the birds to eat. The Ministry of Food urged people to either eat leftovers, or recycle them, so scraps once given to the birds now ended up in communal pig bins.

Birds also suffered badly during two of the hardest winters of the twentieth century, 1939–40 and 1946–7. Even though the second of these freezing winters occurred nearly two years after the end of the war, this was still a lean time for garden birds, as food rationing continued to be in force for almost a decade after the end of the conflict.

* * *

Britain now entered a period of austerity. This would continue right up to the end of the 1950s, when increased economic prosperity finally led Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to make his famous pronouncement that ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’ But curiously, our attitudes to gardens – and our attitudes to garden birds – began to change long before this, as Jenny Uglow points out: ‘There was a slight reaction, and people wanted gardens to be places of colour and scent, and smell…’

Gardening for pleasure was back on the agenda, and part of the pleasure was communing with wildlife. This was reflected, in 1945, by the publication of a little book called Garden Birds, published in the ‘King Penguin’ series. Garden Birds was written by the secretary of the RSPB, Phyllis Barclay-Smith.

Barclay-Smith was a tough, no-nonsense woman in a largely male-dominated world. She served for more than half a century as the assistant secretary of the RSPB, where she was affectionately nicknamed ‘The Dragon’, and was once described (by the leading conservationist Max Nicholson) as ‘the queen bee in her global hive’.

She was also one of the very first people to realise the enormous potential of winning converts to the conservation cause through the birds people saw every day from their back window. The title of her book was the very first time in Britain that the term ‘garden birds’ had appeared in print, and marked a turning point in the way we thought about them.

Garden Birds was, as you might expect from the author’s character, relentlessly no-nonsense and practical in its approach, as Jenny Uglow notes:

She begins by saying that because of industrialisation and the growth of the town, our garden birds are threatened; and that we must make habitats for them. She tells you what trees to plant, where the birds like to nest, and so on. Welcoming the birds back, and not making the garden fiercely productive, is a wonderful reaction to the ferocity of war.

The design of post-war housing also reinforced these trends. In most Victorian and Edwardian homes the kitchen was at the side of the house, out of sight of the back garden. But post-war architects often placed the kitchen at the back of the house, with a clear view of the garden. Jenny Uglow believes this made a huge difference to the growth of interest in garden birds: ‘The number of sinks I’ve seen which look down the garden, and you put objects of interest and entertainment out there, such as the bird table. And so you look from the sink, which is the epitome of drudgery, into the garden, which is the epitome of freedom – and there are these birds, coming and going.’

Outside, the nation’s second-favourite bird – the Blue Tit – was getting up to some novel antics. This was reported by presenter Chris Trace on the children’s television programme Blue Peter, in the early 1960s: ‘It’s not only humans who enjoy a drink of milk. People living all over the country are getting up in the mornings and finding their milk bottle tops torn off, and some of the milk missing…’

Actually it was the cream – not the milk – that was missing. Blue Tits and Great Tits were pecking through the foil tops of bottles left on the doorstep, to get at the rich cream which, being lighter than the milk, had floated to the top. Incredibly, the practice had first been observed in Southampton in 1921, when milk bottles had cardboard tops; but it really took off during the 1950s, when the entire British population of Blue Tits appeared to learn how to get at the cream almost overnight.

This may have looked like an example of evolution in action, but as Tim Birkhead reveals, it was actually a case of individual birds watching and learning from each other, as they always do:

Blue Tits and Great Tits are inquisitive birds, always poking around, peeling off bits of bark and lifting up leaves looking for food items, and peeling off the lid of a milk bottle is not that different really. Birds are doing these things all the time – it’s just with the milk bottles we could see it happening. It was like a little window into their world.

These weren’t the only culprits. According to ornithologist James Fisher, writing in 1957, at least eleven different species of bird had by then been observed opening milk bottles in Britain: Blue, Great, Coal and Marsh Tits, Blackbird, Robin, Chaffinch, Starling, Song Thrush, Dunnock, and of course our cheeky friend the House Sparrow. The practice was also observed abroad: with Great Spotted Woodpeckers in the Danish capital Copenhagen, Jackdaws elsewhere in Denmark, and the Steller’s Jay in parts of western North America. Fisher, and his colleague Dr Robert Hinde, ascribed the behaviour to ‘an insatiable curiosity worthy of Kipling’s Elephant’s Child’.

But even before the delivery of milk to the doorstep went into decline, the tits stopped pecking at the foil tops because of our changing tastes. As we became more health-conscious we switched to homogenised and skimmed milk – thus removing the cream from the top of the bottle.

According to the RSPB, the practice appears to have died out somewhere around the turn of the millennium. Because Blue Tits are so short-lived – typically surviving for just one or two years – within a decade or so the knowledge handed down from parent to youngster no longer included the ability to raid milk bottles.

* * *

Most people didn’t begrudge the tits their share of the cream, perhaps because they were amongst the earliest birds to establish themselves in suburbia. But the post-war period also saw the arrival of two newcomers to the British suburban scene – a dove and a parakeet. The very different welcomes they received would challenge our ideas of what it meant to be British.

The first newcomer, the Collared Dove, arrived almost unnoticed. This was perhaps because it doesn’t have a very glamorous or exciting image, as Mark Cocker confesses: ‘I love all birds, but there’s something essentially very boring about the Collared Dove! Somebody I know described its song as like a rather bored football fan – “U-ni-ted… U-ni-ted…” There is something rather dreary about Collared Doves, and they are beige in colour, but they conceal an incredible story of expansion.’

Originally from India, the Collared Dove had slowly extended its range westward to reach Turkey by the sixteenth century, and the Balkans by the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, in the 1930s, the species began a steady westward surge across Europe, reaching Hungary in 1932, Germany in 1945 (where it is known as the ‘television dove’ because of its habit of perching on rooftop aerials!), the Netherlands in 1947, and France in 1952.

It took a little longer to make the leap across the North Sea. But then, in 1956, a pair of Collared Doves was discovered in a walled garden in north Norfolk – found, ironically, because the observer could not identify the birds’ unfamiliar cooing call. As a keen young birder, Bill Oddie recalls making a special trip to East Anglia to see that very first breeding pair: ‘I think one of the least glamorous twitches I ever went on was to north Norfolk, to see a pair of Collared Doves, which are ten a penny now. Somebody must have noticed them, because I think they’d been there about a year, and bred, before they were announced to the world.’

That particular pair, in a garden in the village of Overstrand, near Cromer, successfully raised two young. From then on the species never looked back. By 1960, just four years after the initial colonisation, Collared Doves had bred in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and by 1966 had successfully bred at least once in every English county.

Within a decade it had been classed as a pest species, and today the Collared Dove breeds throughout Britain and Ireland, from Shetland in the north to the Isles of Scilly in the south – an estimated total of well over a quarter of a million breeding pairs. Collared Doves have even been found in North America, although whether they arrived there naturally or escaped from captivity is open to debate.

The success of the Collared Dove is partly due to its adaptability – the species thrives equally well in towns, suburbs and villages – and partly due to its extraordinary ability to breed in every month of the year, with up to six broods. Once they fledge, immature birds tend to travel long distances, aiding the species’ rapid spread.

Despite his reservations, Mark Cocker salutes its success: ‘Certainly they’ve adapted to urban and suburban environments in an incredibly positive way, and it must now be one of the ten most common birds in the British garden.’

It is – just. In the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch survey, which took place over one weekend in January 2010, the Collared Dove squeezed into ninth place, being found in just over half of all gardens surveyed; whereas in the British Trust for Ornithology’s year-round Garden BirdWatch survey it came tenth, and was found in 72 per cent of gardens. There’s no doubt that this invader from the east is now well and truly here to stay.

Unlike the Collared Dove there was little chance of our second newcomer – the Ring-necked, or as it is sometimes called, Rose-ringed, Parakeet – slipping into the back garden unnoticed. As Mark Cocker points out: ‘In the UK they shout foreignness. They are bright green, they have red beaks, and they have this loud, raucous call…’

The arrival of parakeets, initially in West London gardens from the late 1960s onwards, soon attracted the attention of the media. In 1974, a reporter from the tea-time TV programme Nationwide visited a Mrs Vera Thompkins, who recalled the very first time she saw this exotic and unfamiliar bird outside her back window:

One came and sat on the top of the pear tree in the neighbour’s garden, and I thought what a wonderful thing it would be if it came after my birds’ food. And of course he did. Well then in a day or two there were two, a day or two after that there were three, and then four, and on Boxing Day there were twenty-two!

The Nationwide report suggested that the parakeets had probably escaped from a local aviary. But in the decades that followed their unexpected arrival in the London suburbs, all sorts of urban myths arose to try to explain their origins. These included the idea, recently given a new airing in actor Michael Caine’s biography From the Elephant to Hollywood, that they had escaped from the set of The African Queen, the feature film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, when it was being filmed at Shepperton Studios.

Plausible though this sounds, it has never been explained how or where the birds managed to hide for almost two decades from the making of the film in the early 1950s, to their initial appearance in the late 1960s.

Another wonderful urban myth about the parakeets’ origin claims that the late, great rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix kept two parakeets named Adam and Eve in his girlfriend’s apartment in London’s Carnaby Street. One day, in a drug-fuelled haze of misplaced compassion for these caged creatures, he is supposed to have opened a window and released them into the city streets.

The date of the story – 1969 – certainly fits with the initial arrival of the birds, but no one has ever managed to verify its truth. Even if they could, it seems highly unlikely that the entire UK population – now numbering well into the thousands – could have descended from just one pair.

A far more plausible explanation for their origin is that cage-bird dealers either deliberately or accidentally released flocks of parakeets in several locations around the London suburbs over a period of time, and that these sociable birds eventually managed to find each other and breed. Certainly in the past two decades numbers have increased very rapidly indeed, with more than 3,000 birds seen at a single roost at Esher Rugby Club, Surrey, until the trees in which they spent the night were cut down a few years ago.

Today the Ring-necked Parakeet is a familiar sight on garden bird feeders and in wooded parks throughout the London suburbs with small colonies of the birds spreading farther afield. They have since been recorded in many places across the country, including Yorkshire, Lancashire, North and South Wales, and southern Scotland.

Despite their tropical appearance, these parakeets are well adapted to the British climate – their origins in the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India mean they can cope perfectly well with below-zero temperatures.

They have also taken to the artificial habitat of suburbia as well as any of our other garden birds. David Attenborough, who regularly sees parakeets in his leafy garden in Richmond-upon-Thames in Surrey, welcomes their presence here: ‘I have to say I like them. They of course make a mess and they make a noise, but by golly they’re lovely, aren’t they? They’re absolutely beautiful! I get up in the morning and I look out and there are six or eight parakeets, and it doesn’t half gladden the heart.’

And yet the Ring-necked Parakeet’s acceptance as a truly British bird is not quite complete. Their propensity to feed on fruit buds, and concerns that they might drive out native hole-nesting species such as Starlings, Jackdaws and Stock Doves, has even led to the species being placed on the pest register.

‘The Urban Birder’ David Lindo, who sees the parakeets every day on his local patch at Wormwood Scrubs in West London, is definitely not a fan of what he regards as alien invaders: ‘I’m one of the growing number of people who don’t like parakeets – I actually don’t like them at all. It’s probably because they’re big, they’re green, they’ve got long tails – they just don’t seem to fit in this countryside to me.’

Mark Cocker takes a more measured view, for the moment at least:

To start with they brought a little touch of the exotic, and maybe that has darkened because they’ve become more successful, and there are rumblings that these hole-nesting birds might start to have an effect on native species. I think we’ll see changes in the response from naturalists, and we’ll see changes in response by the public. But for now, I welcome them, and I watch with fascination how the bird will be treated in the twenty-first century.

* * *

It’s no accident that the Ring-necked Parakeet and Collared Dove chose to colonise our suburban gardens rather than the wider countryside. For it was during the latter decades of the twentieth century that a revolution took place in the way we attract birds to our gardens – and at the very same time, a parallel agricultural revolution was making the wider countryside an increasingly difficult and hostile place for birds to live in.

The garden-bird revolution was born out of our growing affluence as a nation, and also from our material prosperity as individuals, which would come to define our contemporary relationship with garden birds. And it was led by bird food.

In the years since birds had first begun to come into gardens, we had fed them – when we had bothered to do so at all – on leftovers from our own table. There was one exception to this: a rather exotic addition to their diet, as environmentalist Chris Baines, who pioneered the modern concept of gardening for wild-life, recalls from his own childhood: ‘When I was a little boy there was a great British tradition of trying to chop coconuts in half, and I vividly remember the fiasco of trying to hit this thing as it was skidding off the table. What you fed to birds was coconuts if you were posh, and breadcrumbs if you weren’t – that was it!’

As our enthusiasm for feeding garden birds grew, those with time and money went further. By the early 1980s, when birdman and broadcaster Tony Soper was making his series Discovering Birds for the BBC, there was a whole host of ingenious recipes for feeding the birds. Tony himself demonstrated one of these – a kind of pudding made from high-energy ingredients – on the programme. As he now recalls, he did so in the tongue-in-cheek style of one of the pioneering TV chefs, the ‘Galloping Gourmet’ Graham Kerr: ‘People liked the idea of cooking for birds, so if you did one of these cod recipes, with fat of some kind, and seeds, of course that’s very attractive to the birds.’

But with increasing demands on their time, fewer and fewer people were cooking for themselves, let alone for the birds. Instead, they turned to a convenient, shop-bought alternative – peanuts in a red net bag. These were low-grade nuts, which had been deemed unfit for human consumption. Although they were potentially nutritious for birds, they had a drawback nobody knew about, as ornithologist Chris Whittles remembers: ‘The problem with peanuts used to be that a large proportion of them coming into the birdfood trade were toxic, contaminated with aflatoxin, which is a breakdown product of a mould.’

And as Chris Whittles now recalls with wry embarrassment, when birds ate the contaminated peanuts, they were slowly poisoned: ‘This used to happen even in my own garden, because I used to feed through to May, and then there would be no birds left. And knowing where I got the peanuts at the time, and knowing what I now know, by that point I’d managed to kill off all the Greenfinches in the garden!’

Ironically, Chris Whittles was one of the first people to realise the seriousness and extent of the problem, and when he set up his own bird-food business, CJ Wildbird Foods, he took great care to source his peanuts so that they did not contain the poison.

He was also, along with a handful of other pioneers, one of those who during the 1970s and 1980s began to innovate, developing high-quality products designed to mimic the food eaten by wild birds, including sunflower seeds and hearts, nyger seed (particularly loved by Goldfinches) and a wide range of fat-based products.

Indeed for the Goldfinch, one of the most beautiful of our garden birds, these new products led to a change in the species’ fortunes. After a sharp decline from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the Goldfinch population has bounced back rapidly. This is largely thanks to the widespread provision of high-energy seeds, and flocks of these colourful birds are now a very common sight on garden bird feeders. Its close relative the Siskin – a small, streaky finch with green, yellow and black plumage – has also benefitted from a rise in garden bird feeding, enabling it to extend its range southwards from Scotland into southern Britain. Today the Siskin is a relatively frequent visitor to many gardens, especially in late winter and early spring when supplies of natural food are at their lowest.

Other unusual species also came into our gardens, many for the first time, attracted by these increasingly sophisticated foods that quickly and efficiently deliver the energy the birds need. Today, well over one hundred different kinds of bird have been recorded coming to bird tables and feeders. Whereas we once only saw sparrows, Starlings, tits and finches, by the early twenty-first century, garden birdwatchers were enjoying such unexpected visitors as Great Spotted Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, Blackcaps and Long-tailed Tits.

The new products, stacked on supermarket shelves in bright, colourful wrappers, also proved irresistible to bird-loving shoppers. Chris Baines regards this as simply another aspect of the growing consumerism of the late twentieth century:

It’s quite striking to look at how the packaging and the convenience of birdfood has tracked the way in which we’ve changed our own eating habits. The rise and rise of prepared meals in Marks & Spencer’s is echoed by being able to buy the ‘fat bar’ – none of this getting fat from the butcher and melting it down and mixing it with peanuts and things – it’s all there in a plastic package!

Today, feeding birds is yet another way in which we express ourselves as consumers, and even practise the art of one-upmanship, according to David Lindo:

I think a lot of people deep down do feed birds for selfish reasons – but in a good way. They want to say ‘in my garden I get this, that and the other – I get Bullfinches, Chaffinches… I’ve got a great garden for birds – what have you got?!’ There is that competitive edge, but that’s fine, because it’s benefitting the birds, whichever way you look at it, and it’s bringing nature closer to that person as well.

It is this deeper need to reconnect with nature that underpins our nation’s vast expenditure on bird food – at least £150 million pounds a year. However, Mark Cocker sees this not just as an expression of our consumer society, but as another way in which we make links between ourselves and the natural world:

Day after day people provide food for the birds, and extraordinary relationships of trust are built up. I think it’s our chance to step outside the fate of our species, which is a terrible one – I mean who wants to be feared by every other creature?! And that simple, Franciscan act of giving to birds makes us feel good about life, and redeems us in some fundamental way.

* * *

Our urge to reconnect with nature through the birds in our gardens is nonetheless tempered by the fact that the garden itself is an artificial, semi-domesticated space, created by us. Jeremy Mynott is concerned that by feeding garden birds, we may be in danger of turning them into little more than ‘wild pets’: ‘I think the wish to feed garden birds is part of a larger emotional wish to somehow make the birds dependent on us, and control the birds as part of our environment – to “decorate” the environment with birds.’

The desire for control over wild nature has always been part and parcel of gardening. We’ve always favoured some plants at the expense of others, and waged war on those we consider to be weeds. And in recent years the popularity of television gardening makeover programmes such as Ground Force has led us to regard the garden not as outside of, and separate from, our home, but as part of it – effectively an extra room.

Now, having invested time and money bringing birds into this space, we may subconsciously want to control them too – we want them to behave in ways that conform to our own moral codes. This can throw up both practical and emotional issues, as Helen Macdonald points out: ‘If you put a bird table in your garden, you are creating a Sparrowhawk feeding station. It’s really quite funny and distressing to realise that when a Sparrowhawk flies along the backs of suburban gardens it’s just taking advantage of the wonderful feeding opportunities people have created for it.’

When this ruthless predator does pay a visit, Helen Macdonald understands people’s emotional response:

People get very upset about Sparrowhawks, for example, because they see their garden as an extension of their living-space. So when you look out of the window and you see a Sparrowhawk pulling a Blackbird or a pigeon to pieces on your patio, it’s kind of “murder on the living-room floor”. And this is why some birds are described as being mean, or evil, or villainous, because they become part of the human world.

And as Bill Oddie notes, the arrival of uninvited predators into our gardens throws into sharp relief the emotional ties we develop with the birds we feed: ‘If you’ve got used to “your” Blue Tits, and some great big predator goes whizzing through, and basically takes that away, I think inside you’re going “Aaagh! That’s mine!” And you know you’ve lost something.’

As a result, many of us have begun to divide garden birds into two camps: on one side, our friends, and on the other, our enemies, according to Jeremy Mynott:

We project human values onto the birds, and then admire them or dislike them for those. We like the Robin because it is tame and confiding – or so it appears, in fact it’s the merest cupboard love – we dislike Magpies and Starlings because we think they are noisy, rackety birds, vulgar and aggressive. These are all human characteristics.

Mark Cocker shares this view: ‘The melodrama that is the garden, and our encounter with it, can lead to the introduction of moral ideas in nature, which are very unhelpful.’

He points to the way that many people view Magpies – as the arch-villain of the garden soap opera – as a case in point. ‘Magpies are big, bold songbirds, with not much of a song, with a great taste for young songbirds of other species, and we really hate the fact that they eat our Blackbirds, and steal tits out of the bushes.’ But Magpies are fascinating birds too – intelligent and calculating. Tim Birkhead certainly thinks so, as he wrote a book about them, The Magpies, in 1991:

They’re confident, they’re cocky, and they’re incredibly smart. So they will find a Blackbird or Song Thrush nest, and if the parents mob them or chase them away, they just bide their time, and come back at a more appropriate time. And then, much to everybody’s horror they butcher the offspring on the lawn in front of you.

Branded as baby-killers, there’s a popular view, promulgated through lurid headlines in the tabloid newspapers and on the web, that Magpies are responsible for a decline in songbirds. Tim Birkhead utterly refutes this: ‘There’s no scientific evidence that Magpies have been responsible for the decrease in garden birds or songbirds. The British Trust for Ornithology was involved in a very detailed survey, we at the University of Sheffield were involved too, and from a scientific point of view there’s no evidence for that.’

So, although perhaps the majority of Britons blame the Magpie for a perceived decrease in songbird populations (even though, incidentally, the populations of most garden bird species are on the rise), others admire their intelligence and tenacity. Among their impassioned proponents is David Lindo: ‘Magpies I defend to the death. I’ve had many fights with people over them, and people saying that Magpies and Sparrowhawks are causing the decline of songbirds. Well I think we’re using Magpies and Sparrowhawks as scapegoats, because we are the animal that has caused the decline of songbirds much more than them.’

When viewing the garden-bird soap opera through anthropomorphic spectacles, we are often blind to the real villains – to our own role in the drama. As well as the negative effects of modern farming, industry and transport policies on bird populations, there is another factor much closer to home. Britain’s domestic cats kill fifty-five million birds every year. This has placed organisations such as the RSPB in a tricky position: do they condemn cats as ‘unnatural’ killers of our native birds, and risk losing cat-loving members, or do they ignore the problem? So far they have tried to occupy the middle ground, offering advice on how to minimise the carnage by keeping cats indoors at dawn and dusk, or putting a bell on them. Whether this will eventually reduce the number of birds killed by cats we shall have to wait and see.

So although our relationship with garden birds is thoroughly modern, our attitudes to individual species remain pretty traditional, resistant to change even in the face of new scientific evidence.

We have our favourites, like the Robin; our friends, like the Blue Tit; and our enemies – top of the list being the Magpie and the Sparrowhawk. And in the garden-bird family there has always been one poor relation: the House Sparrow.

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The recent history of Britain’s sparrows reveals not only the strength of our passion for our feathered neighbours, but also our inability as garden owners to influence their fate. David Lindo, who has lived in London for the whole of his life, remembers what the situation was like when he was growing up in the capital during the 1970s and 1980s:

As a birder I never really used to look at sparrows, and then after a while I realised they weren’t around any more. I used to see them all over the place – in Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, if you went to the cafés and sat down for a cup of tea there would be sparrows by your feet. And then all of a sudden there were none there.

The rapid decline of the House Sparrow, from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, was documented by the greatest ornithologist of the twentieth century, Max Nicholson. As a young man, in 1925, Nicholson carried out a survey of the birds of Kensington Gardens, the London park near his home. Of almost 5,000 individual birds he counted, 2,600 – more than half – were House Sparrows.

In the autumn of 2000, seventy-five years after his initial survey, the ninety-six-year-old Nicholson returned to Kensington Gardens to count the birds once again. This time he found just eight sparrows – a decrease of well over 99 per cent in the intervening years. Today, a decade or so later, there are none.

Bill Oddie, who has lived in London since the 1960s, recalls seeing one famous form of interaction between human beings and sparrows: ‘Every park had an old gentleman, who fed the sparrows, and he always had his arms out and a hat on, and he’d be covered in them. And you could do it too. I’ve got photographs from that time, but you won’t find this happening now.’

In the early 1990s, people living in Britain’s towns and cities began to notice that their local sparrows were rapidly disappearing. Sparrow expert Denis Summers-Smith, who has studied the species since the late 1940s, takes up the story: ‘They wrote to their local newspapers, they contacted their local councillors, questions were even asked in the House of Commons – what is happening to our sparrows?’

Having been taken for granted for so long, the House Sparrow was suddenly on our radar. A nation of bird-lovers was demanding to know what was going on with their cheeky little chappy. In May 2000, a major national newspaper, the Independent, launched a campaign to investigate. They offered a prize of £5,000 for the first person to write a published paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which explained the reasons for the sparrows’ sudden decline in our towns and cities.

The answer still isn’t clear, but we do know that sparrow chicks are dying in the nest of starvation due to a shortage of insect food, and even those that fledge are not surviving to maturity. Together with other factors, such as the shortage of nest-sites (due to the ‘yuppification’ of housing and attic conversions, causing the removal of nest-sites under eaves), this appears to have dealt a fatal blow to the urban sparrow population.

Ironically, history may be repeating itself. Having initiated the decline of House Sparrows in the 1930s, motor vehicles are once again being linked to the current catastrophic fall in numbers. Denis Summers-Smith, who when he wasn’t studying sparrows was pursuing a distinguished career as an industrial chemist, believes he knows the reason why: ‘The one common cause, I think, is atmospheric pollution, coming from motor vehicles.’

Summers-Smith suggests that a component added to unleaded petrol to prevent ‘knocking’ in engines may be killing off the insects on which the baby sparrows so depend. He also believes that other chemicals, emitted by diesel engines, may also be damaging the respiratory systems of sparrow chicks, preventing them from reaching maturity.

So although the Independent’s prize has not yet been awarded, it seems certain that a combination of factors beyond the garden fence is responsible for the sparrow’s demise. Much like the miner’s Canary, our sparrows may be telling us something important about our own environment. Denis Summers-Smith certainly believes so: ‘Sparrows live in our urban habitat, and if something is happening to them it is high time we knew what it is, because it may be happening to us later on.’

In August 2007, our longest-standing garden bird, once so numerous as to have been considered a pest, was put on the Red List of threatened species.

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The creation of the modern British garden gave us a new, suburban space, in which we forged an equally modern relationship with the birds that came to live alongside us. Garden birds are creatures of our making, and by watching and feeding them we’ve come to know them intimately, and drawn them deeper into our domestic and emotional lives than any other group of birds.