Hello, sparrows

This month, I’m not focusing on a native species but for good reason (for me, anyway). The house sparrow is relatively common, not spectacularly attractive nor interesting but if I didn’t almost fall over when I spotted a small flock nibbling on grass seeds a few weeks ago!

This is one of those animals that I just haven’t seen since I was a little girl. We had a budgie, named Sammy, and he used to free fly around the house and was allowed to do all manner of disgusting things like sit on the edge of our glasses and have a little drink. That progressed to me opening my mouth, bird on finger, letting him, for some reason, have a nibble at my teeth. All the while Mum was there in the background screaming, “Amanda, if you sneeze, you’ll bite his head off!” I tell you, the ’80s were a wild time.

During the day, Sammy would be in his cage and hung just outside our front door to catch some sunshine and generally delight in not having to stick his head inside a small child’s mouth. But he was far from alone. The house sparrows came to visit from near and far. Firstly, they were there to take advantage of all the seed that would rain down from his cage, spending hours hoovering up his mess.

And then, Sammy and the sparrows became friends. Genuinely. He started to speak to them in their own language and it became pretty fascinating viewing, watching our budgie chatting in ‘sparrow speak’ to the other birds.

Sparrows are large finches and were introduced to Australia in the 1860s, firstly to Victoria and then they spread throughout Eastern Australia. They’re quite adaptable and will eat everything from insects, scraps of human food through to grass seeds. However, their numbers in Europe are in decline. Not that many people are overly upset though. The house sparrow is an agricultural pest in many places, and can be an aggressive bird that out-competes other species.

Still, any sort of population decline need to be examined for the ‘why’. So, it was a very pleasant surprise to find a handful of them nibbling the grass and bathing in the dust of a carpark. They might be an unwanted pest to some but, to me, they’ll always be the eaters of the discarded seed, the friends of Sammy.

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