Sparrow Clubs

With populations in decline across the UK, count yourself lucky if House Sparrows are among your lockdown garden residents. ©Paul Sterry/Nature Photographers Ltd

House Sparrows are commensal birds, one literal translation of the term being ‘eating at the same table’. Nowadays urban and suburban gardens and parks are important refuges for the species – avian support bubbles if you like – and periods of lockdown provide us with the opportunity to appreciate this often-overlooked bird.

However, the presence of House Sparrows in the UK has not always been welcomed. Step forward one Eleanor Ormerod, an indomitable Victorian English lady who was an enlightened aesthete, highly-regarded for her economic entomological prowess, and her particular interest in what she regarded, rightly or wrongly, as ‘pests’. Revered in farming circles for her rather personalised understanding of what today we would call ecology (the inter-connectivity of life) and her ‘innovative’ ways of controlling insect pests, she was reviled by others. And she had an uncompromising attitude towards House Sparrows, which she regarded as ‘avian rats’.

The humble House Sparrow, the object of Eleanor Ormerod’s ire. ©Paul Sterry/Nature Photographers Ltd

There is a slightly perverse, infantile logic to Eleanor’s thinking regarding House Sparrows: they eat grain (amongst other things) and therefore they cause deprivation in the rural community. She wasn’t the first to hold the humble sparrow in contempt of course, and in the 18th Century there were ‘Sparrow Clubs’ across Britain (in every parish it is said), whose members were dedicated to the destruction of adult birds as well as their eggs and chicks. Prizes were awarded for those who killed the most.

At first Eleanor’s campaign followed a typical course for the time: a letter to The Times in which she called for the extermination of House Sparrows. Inevitably there followed a crusading pamphlet and thereafter she campaigned for the revival of the ‘Sparrow Clubs’ which by that time had fallen out of fashion as the human population became more urbanised. In the context of sparrows, this is Eleanor Ormerod’s legacy but unwittingly she did stir up a storm of protest from ‘nature lovers’ and those concerned with animal welfare. So perhaps she should be remembered as well for unintentionally creating a groundswell of feeling that contributed to the genesis of what today we call conservation. That includes the birth of the RSPB – initially the Society for the Protection of Birds - founded in 1889 by another redoubtable Victorian lady, Emily Williamson.

There is an irony to the fact that by the end of the century that followed Eleanor Ormerod’s death in 1901 her wish was coming true with regards to House Sparrows. Populations crashed and today in the UK the species is a cause for conservation concern and Red Listed in the most recent Birds of Conservation Concern report. Since the mid-1970s, urban sparrow numbers have declined by 60% with populations in the countryside following a similar trend. And in London, numbers of cheeky cockney sparrows fell by 60% between 1994 and 2004. The jury is out regarding the causes but most readers can probably guess the candidates: lack of winter stubble; sanitised, industrial farming methods; a catastrophic decline in insect numbers in part due to the increased ‘efficiency’ of modern pesticides (seasonally, invertebrates comprise up to 75% of a House Sparrow’s diet); a tidy-minded approach to gardening; the list goes on.

Who knows whether Sparrow Club members’ efforts were restricted to House Sparrows but it would be no surprise if Tree Sparrows were also in the firing line. ©Paul Sterry/Nature Photographers Ltd

Contempt for sparrows is not a uniquely British phenomenon and China provides another shockingly vivid example. In 1958, the founding father of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong, launched the Four Pests Campaign against rats, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows, as part of an effort to improve the lot of the Chinese people. With military-style efficiency birds were shot, eggs and young were destroyed, and communities collaborated to create noise and disturbance to keep the birds in the air until they died of exhaustion or dehydration. It is likely that Tree Sparrows P. montanus were vilified in the same manner as House Sparrows and no distinction was made between the two species.

The Great Sparrow Campaign was such so successful that China virtually eliminated ‘sparrows’ (and presumably other passerine farmland birds as well) within two years. However, there were unintended consequences, and far from seeing greater crop yields, harvests crashed. The architects of the Campaign had failed to consider that that the diet of sparrows was about 75% insects and 25% grain and without predatory control the insects were wreaking havoc on crops. This led ultimately to the Great Chinese Famine that claimed the lives of an estimated 20 million people.

In the absence of an understanding of House Sparrow diet and ecology it is easy to imagine how, in the past, a flock might have been viewed as akin to a plague of locusts as it descended on a crop. Sizeable House Sparrow flocks are a thing of the past in the UK – these Spanish Sparrows in southern Europe give a flavour of the scene. ©Paul Sterry/Nature Photographers Ltd

If you would like to learn more about Eleanor Ormerod, a good read is Bugs and the Victorians by John F.M. Clark, particularly the chapter entitled ‘A Female Entomologist’. For more information about China’s Great Sparrow Campaign follow this link.