A campaign for the forgotten bird — and for the ground that stopped being able to hold it.
The house sparrow was once one of Britain's most abundant birds. Over the last fifty years, we have lost approximately 30 million of them. Stretch that back a century, and the figure may be as high as 120 million.
In the 1970s, there were roughly 12 million breeding pairs. Today that number has fallen by 71% — a loss of 8.52 million breeding pairs. While sparrows still top the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch, the average counts are the lowest since records began. They are down 64% compared to the first survey in 1979.
Even though they are still the most commonly seen bird, the actual number of sparrows out there is a fraction of what it was.
≈30 million
House sparrows lost in Britain over the last fifty years. Stretch the record back a century and the figure may be as high as 120 million.
−71%
Roughly 12 million breeding pairs in the 1970s. A loss of 8.52 million pairs since.
−64%
Sparrows still top the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, but average counts are the lowest since records began — down 64% on the first survey in 1979.
The loss of winter stubble, the disappearance of hedgerows and increased pesticide use contributed to a 47% decline in rural populations since the mid-1970s.
Populations in cities dropped by about 60%. In Greater London alone, 70% of sparrows were lost between 1994 and 2001. The decline has been linked to the loss of nesting sites, a lack of insect food for chicks, and even the introduction of unleaded petrol.
The most dangerous part of this story is that the loss is being forgotten.
A 2009 study from Imperial College London demonstrated that while older residents could accurately recall that sparrow and starling populations were common twenty years ago, younger residents believed the current diminished population was the natural state of things.
This generational amnesia means that what is accepted as "normal" nature in the UK is a shadow of what existed just two generations ago.
We had an old train cabin caravan. It sat in the corner of a field, where a hawthorn hedgerow met the fence. Not a picture of a hedgerow — the thing itself. A double line of blackthorn and hawthorn, laid by hand, grown thick over generations, running along the field's edge right past our door.
Every May it came into blossom. The whole hedgerow turned white, and the smell of it — sweet, faintly bruised, the smell of something alive and working — carried in through the caravan's open window on warm evenings. And the sparrows. The sparrows lived in it. You could hear them before you saw them. A busy, churring noise, all day, the sound of small lives being lived close together in the thorns.
I was a quiet kid. I spent a lot of time at that hedgerow. Watching. Listening. I did not have words for what it was doing for me. I know now it was the first place my nervous system learned to settle. The chatter of the sparrows. The white drift of the May blossom. The hum. It held me.
We were told the haws were poison. Don't eat them. Don't touch them. I believed it. But my friends, the sparrows, ate them happily. All autumn they worked the berries — hopping along the thorns, stripping the red, feeding in a hurry. They knew something I had been told to be afraid of. I watched them and began to doubt the warning. They were right. Hawthorn berries are not poison. The hawthorn is one of our oldest heart medicines — a tonic for the muscle that keeps us going. What I was told to fear was medicine in disguise.
Then they took the hedgerow out. One autumn, between one year and the next, it was gone — grubbed up to widen the margin, the ground ploughed to the fence. The blossom did not come back. The sparrows did not come back. The silence came in its place. I remember standing at the caravan door and not understanding why it felt so wrong. I was a child. I did not have the word baseline. I just knew something that held me had been taken out.
That hedgerow is the thread. The Radical Apothecary is the work of putting it back — not the same hedgerow, but the same holding. The same shelter. The same conditions under which a small living thing can settle and grow.
— Barry Doak, founder
The decline of the sparrow is not separate from the work of The Radical Apothecary. It is the same pattern. The same architecture of extraction. The same loss of habitat, food and nesting ground. The same fragmentation of connection.
Para la gente. — The Radical Apothecary.