Celebration Day

I know house sparrows are common everyday sort of birds but we did miss them when they’d gone. We went from plenty to none in the space of a few days.

Yes, there were enough of them to keep us worrying that they would eat all the food put out for interesting birds, those more colourful and exciting than the ordinary brown sparrow.

We lived in a huge 5 bedroomed house with a long garden, situated near fields and woods, a river and a golfcourse, the ideal place to capture the attention of our wildlife favourites.

Woodpeckers visited daily, along with a diverse number of assorted finches, different kinds of warblers, wrens, jays, blackbirds, treecreepers, long tailed tits, nuthatches, crested tits and many other similar varieties, as well as an assortment of hawks, ring necked doves, crows and magpies, but no pigeons. We didn’t want pigeons. We didn’t want sparrows either but we had plenty of them.

Then the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) started to worry us with tales of the rapid decline of certain birds and we began to notice the drop in numbers of our daily visitors. It was a slow process, nothing to be concerned about. Or so we thought. However, as the years went by we began to believe it. Just think, without birds we could lose our planet!

Twenty years ago we moved house. Didn’t go far, just over the rooftops, so to speak, to a road parallel to the one we’d lived in for so long. We did go a little further uphill though, thinking then of approaching old age and infirm limbs! Consideration had to be given to future journeys to the shops in the (unlikely) event that we might have to abandon our cars. The new residence was to be a bungalow so stairs wouldn’t be a problem, this idea coming after a spell when I suffered a broken ankle and had to negotiate stairs by sitting on the backside.

We definitely downsized, the bungalow being more like a fairy cottage after the big house with the picturesque stained glass windows. Oooh but I did miss that grand staircase that I should only have used when wearing a crinoline dress … like in the films.

But I digress!

The garden was lovelier and more attractive than the last one, wider, longer and very mature.

(click here for more views of the garden)

It had more fruit trees and two lawns and with the trio of ponds, each one cascading into the next, I just knew the herons would come. They did, along with most but not all the bird varieties we’d been used to, and only about five sparrows which rapidly reduced to none. We’d only moved across the rooftops, surely they could fly uphill?

Well, from that day to this there have been no sparrows. We have plenty of dunnocks but NO house sparrows. Let’s face it, twenty years is a long time to be without sparrows! I actually thought they were extinct, that is until yesterday. Whilst eating dinner I happened to look out at the garden and … well, blow me down, there were two house sparrows at the seed feeder. They were back again today and they brought a friend. My Guy reckons they’re about to start a new dynasty. Hopefully we’re back in business. All I need to do now is get rid of the perishing WOODPIGEONS.