Garden Birds Birds Britannia

We British are more obsessed with birds

than any other nation on Earth,

and have been for much of our history.

From feeding ducks in the park to listening for the first cuckoo of spring.

From inspiring some of our best-loved poetry...

..to filling our stomachs.

The deep relationship between the British and our birds

reveals as much about us as it does about the birds themselves.

Birdsong, bird flight, birds' residence around us

cements our relationship with them.

And there is no equal in our landscape, and that's why birds are so important to the British.

And 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.

To an awful lot of people, there is nothing but garden birds.

The only birds they actually see are in their garden.

They perform a daily soap opera outside our back window, a soap opera whose characters

reflect our own attitudes, prejudices and emotions.

And yet our relationship with garden birds is a surprisingly modern phenomenon.

It's the result of some of the most dramatic changes in British society in the last 150 years.

We are a nation of gardeners who have become a nation of garden-bird lovers.

The British are obsessed with garden birds as they're obsessed with gardening.

If you've ever listened to Gardeners' Question Time on the radio,

you know how high passions run.

Our gardens are where we spend a great deal of time.

The birds in our gardens are the birds that

we interact with most in our lives, and we follow them on a journey.

I think that's very emotional for some people, and it engenders

a very deep and intimate relationship with the natural world.

No matter how small your garden is, there will be a bird that comes to it.

They bring a breath of the natural world, of the non-human world.

They're the one things that do.

They're magical in that they suddenly take off and disappear, and you've no idea where they've gone,

and yet they come back again.

Two out of three of us now feed wild birds in our gardens,

spending over £150 million a year in the process.

Yet 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 feed it.

And the very concept of garden birds was meaningless - 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 that we've created.

These are birds of the woodland edge that have moved into what we've defined as garden areas.

In little more than 100 years, 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 10,000 years ago,

when one adaptable little bird sought out our company for the very first time.

-The house sparrow.

-It's small, it's a chunky little bird.

Wonderful chestnuts and browns.

In a drab sort of way, it's a very colourful bird, I think.

But mostly what's good about a sparrow is its behaviour.

It's a sort of cheeky Cockney sparrow.

House sparrows have lived alongside humans longer than any other wild bird.

The sparrow's engagement with it is peculiarly intimate,

and is rooted in the development of agriculture.

Agriculture is thought to have originated in the fertile present

in the Middle East, and house-sparrow distribution probably began

and spread with agriculture out across Europe

as agriculture itself was passed from community to community.

And as it moved,

they found a way to live beside us.

Sparrows found nest sites on our homes and food in our fields and farmyards.

But their dependence on us meant that we viewed them with suspicion from the outset.

Sparrows very early on were regarded as pests

because they fed on the cereal crops that the farmer had grown.

In fact, the first evidence for this in the UK was

in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Her Parliament passed an act which allowed the payment of head money for sparrows.

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.

One of the interesting things about sparrows is 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, sparrows haven't,

and I think that's to do with the fact that, because they ate grain,

they were harvested and they were eaten.

It's not all that easy to catch such a clever bird,

so our ancestors turned to Holland for a practical solution.

Dutch engineers who came over and drained the Fens brought with them what were known as sparrow pots.

Sparrow pots were put up on farm buildings, primarily to prevent the sparrows nesting in the thatch

and destroying the thatch, but also, they were on a hook, they could be

lifted off and the housewife could put her hand in the bag and remove either the sparrows or the eggs.

These would very often go into a pot in the kitchen.

Sparrows were caught and eaten in the countryside right up until the middle of the 20th 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.

In the 19th century, the balance of population between

rural England and urban England changed quite dramatically.

So in the early 19th century, the great majority of people lived in the countryside.

By 1900, only about one in five people actually lived in the countryside.

So we effectively changed from being a rural nation to being an urban nation.

Given how dependent sparrows were on humans, it's not surprising that,

as we moved into towns, they were the one bird that came along with us.

One aspect of the growing cities is that

they're still terribly close to the country.

Not just physically, but the fact that

there's a lot of agricultural animals actually in the city.

You have horses everywhere, you have stables,

but also, in the parks, like in St James's Park in London, there are cows and there are sheep.

So those birds which thrive on dung and seeds and so on, 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.

The houses provide excellent nesting opportunities, where they were safe.

They couldn't be caught easily by birds of prey and by cats.

One of the reasons why

the sparrows that lived in towns did rather better was that

man's attitude towards them was quite different.

They rather welcomed this bird coming to live close to them.

The townsfolk's new-found affection for sparrows was

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.

The working classes and the 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.

I have this wonderful book from the late 19th century called Home Pets. It's full of the usual suspects,

dogs, cats and birds. And the kinds of birds that were kept

at this time in the home weren't just canaries and budgerigars.

Everything from wheatears to nightingales, goldfinches, linnets -

a whole pantheon of British bird species were being kept.

And many of the people in the cities kept caged birds for their song.

The song of the bird was like the music of the country.

And you could close your eyes and listen to the birds sing,

and you could be transported back to the countryside that you came from.

It wasn't seen as cruel.

In fact, people write about particular species, like goldfinches,

"Happy in its cage - it sings more."

These creep into Victorian novels, too.

A famous example can be found in Charles Dickens' Bleak House.

Now, my dears. Hope, joy, youth, peace, rest, life.

Oh, your time has come!

One character, old Miss Flite, has become embroiled in a long-running

court case, but takes comfort in her collection of caged birds.

She has sparrows and she has linnets and she has goldfinches,

and her idea is to set them free when the case is settled.

Goodbye, my little ones.

The wild bird for people in the city becomes an emblem of the freedom that they have lost.

Not surprisingly, the most popular caged birds were those with the most attractive song.

The nightingale was one of the most popular caged birds, but because

it was a very difficult bird to keep in captivity,

requiring live food - worms and insect larvae and so on -

and as a result of having

very wet droppings, it was a dirty bird to keep.

So you had to go to a lot of trouble both to feed it and keep it clean.

In a way, the nightingale was knocked off its perch by the canary.

Whether exotic or British, caged birds served another purpose beyond their song.

It was felt that encouraging children to keep caged birds was very good moral instruction, because if you had

a pair of canaries in the cage and they were breeding, you could see

Mum and Dad feeding the chicks simultaneously.

They were like a model human couple, in a way.

Because the Victorians believed birds paired for life,

unlike many other creatures, the Church had singled them out for special attention.

One clergyman was particularly influential in shaping attitudes to birds at this time.

The Reverend Francis Orpen Morris was typical of

the clergy of his day in that he regarded

all of bird life as moral creatures from which we had to learn.

The hedge sparrow - or, as it's now known, the dunnock - was a favourite with Morris.

The dunnock is a shy little bird, isn't it?

A reclusive little bird that, in bird-table terms, is walking round

the bottom of the bird table and picking up the crumbs.

And yet it's one of these birds when you get a really good, close look at it,

it has very fine plumage and a lovely pair of legs, and so on. And a nice little, thin bill.

Humble in its behaviour, drab and sober in its dress,

this was the perfect model for how all his parishioners should behave.

But then the Reverend Orpen Morris didn't know the truth about the dunnock, did he?

Because the dunnock is an animal that lives a scandalous... A truly scandalous life.

It enters into every relationship possible.

Polygamy, polygyny, polyandry, promiscuity...

You name it, the dunnock does it, basically.

This scandalous behaviour was only revealed in the 1990s, and shown in the BBC series The Life Of Birds.

This is her mate Alpha, singing lustily.

There's a third bird around, Beta.

# Ooh, you gotta give and take... #

Dunnocks, instead of breeding as a conventional pair,

often breed as a trio,

two males paired simultaneously to one female.

Alpha seldom lets her out of her his sight,

for she's not as faithful as she might be.

The female wants both males to mate with her,

because if both males mate with her,

both of them will help rear her chicks.

But she has got her eye cocked.

Beta is still in the hedge, calling quietly to her.

Usually, both males do mate.

The way the males get round that is by copulating with the female

at an incredible rate, as many as 100 copulations a day.

Twirling her tail is an invitation

and in a split second, Beta mates with her.

But now, out in the open,

she's courting Alpha with that same old tail-twirling.

She exposes her cloaca and the male that's about to copulate

will peck at the female's cloaca.

Basically he's watching and waiting for her to eject sperm

from the previous mating.

As a droplet of sperm comes out, he looks at it - OK -

and then he copulates with her.

The other thing that's remarkable is those copulations of the dunnock

are so fast, it's about a tenth of a second.

That must be almost the fastest bird copulation there is.

He basically flies over her.

Morris saw them as very respectable birds and the truth is, I'm afraid,

the only moral you can draw from them is that it's every man for himself.

Morality wasn't 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 its centre, were children's humane societies, such as

the RSPCA's Bands of Mercy, and the Dicky Bird Society,

founded in 1876 by WE Adams.

William Edwin Adams

was editor of the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle from 1864.

He was also very politically active here in Newcastle.

Adams wrote a column for children each week, under the pseudonym of Uncle Toby.

His objective was to encourage humane behaviour towards animals.

A key part 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 our towns and cities.

By encouraging children to feed wild birds,

the Dicky Bird Society promoted a pastime that would forge

a lasting bond between the British people and their garden birds.

And their recruits came from some surprising places.

There is a letter to the Dicky Bird Society from children of Dover Workhouse,

which tells Uncle Toby

that they were collecting crumbs from their table

to feed to the birds the next day.

The Dicky Bird Society was a highly-successful organisation,

attracting hundreds of thousands of children throughout the country.

Together with other children's organisations, they could boast millions of members.

It seems that as the 19th 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.

The Victorians were caught up in a massive ethical dilemma about feeding garden birds.

On the one hand, Victorian Society and values were dominated by the concept of self-help.

You had to look after yourself, you couldn't depend on the state

for welfare and for support in hard times.

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.

Victorian Britain was also dominated by these emerging new sensibilities for nature,

by this wave of humanitarianism that developed, decade by decade.

That was extremely powerful.

The Victorians couldn't bear to see suffering.

So when hard winters kicked in like 1890 to 1891 and birds began to die

in Victorian gardens, there was then a battle for control of the Victorian mind.

In the end, it was the humanitarianism that won

and the Victorians fed the garden birds in times of great peril.

A major winner from this change in attitudes towards feeding birds

was the robin, the nation's favourite bird.

There's a very rich folklore

associated with the robin that goes way, way back.

How did the robin get its red breast?

The robin 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 it has a red breast.

It's associated in a fairly deep way with the New Testament.

Robins, by Shakespeare's time and possibly long before then,

are associated with charity and piety.

In the Victorian era,

the robin's position in our popular culture became even more entrenched.

Robins appear on Christmas cards

through a rather strange process of causation.

Robins gave their names to the first postmen, who wore red tunics,

and were therefore called robins.

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.

The robin gave its name to the postman and the postman gave its role to the robin.

Every year since, highly sentimental images of robins have appeared

on our Christmas cards, an annual renewal of our commitment to them.

By the early 20th century, the foundations of today's special relationship

with the birds living alongside us had already been laid.

We didn't yet call them garden birds, but a growing number of people regarded these 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.

MUSIC: "Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag, And Smile, Smile, Smile" by George Henry Powell

In August 1914, within days of the outbreak of the First World War, the Defence of the Realm Act was passed.

This draconian piece of legislation outlawed many activities, including the wastage of food.

Almost overnight, feeding garden birds became illegal,

and people were even prosecuted for doing so.

"An elderly woman was fined at Woking

"for giving bread to wild birds.

"She stated that she'd lost her only son in Mesopotamia,

"but all she used were the dirty bottom crusts she couldn't eat.

"And that she'd fed the birds for 70 years and would continue to do so."

She was fined two guineas, the equivalent of more than £100 today.

One familiar species wasn't simply deprived of food,

but became one of the first casualties of war on the Home Front.

Sparrows had long been persecuted in the countryside because they ate grain.

But now people in the suburbs became concerned about the threat they posed to the nation's food supply,

so they joined organisations known as sparrow clubs.

These may sound benevolent, but they had a very sinister aim.

The sparrow club was a way of dealing with this urban,

or suburban, vermin species,

and it would be a cluster of working-class people

who would bring in their tallies from the sparrows they'd killed

in their allotment or in their garden, et cetera.

The one who killed the greatest number of sparrows

would win a silver cup for that year.

Sparrow clubs caught sparrows in a number of different ways.

The most common was to use large nets.

The captured birds were then either killed and eaten or they were taken

to either gentlemen's clubs or to pubs, where they were then used as targets for trap shooting.

Hundreds of thousands of sparrows were killed by sparrow clubs during the war.

But because the culls took place at the end of the breeding season, when numbers were at their peak,

it actually had very little impact on the population.

Ironically, it was what we did in peace-time

that would bring about a collapse in sparrow numbers.

Things dramatically changed in the decade from 1920-1930.

The horse, as a means of transport and pulling carts round

and so on, disappeared from the streets.

It was displaced by the internal combustion engine.

City sparrows had long depended on spilt horse feed and undigested seeds in horse droppings for food.

So the replacement of horses with cars and buses deprived them of a vital resource.

There's no doubt at all, it had a dramatic effect on the number of sparrows that occurred in the town.

Without even trying, we'd reduced the numbers of the 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.

It's interesting how recent, of course, the garden bird phenomenon is.

If you read books about birds in the 18th, 19th, early-20th century,

no-one talks about garden birds.

It goes with the growth of suburbia.

In just two decades, from 1920 to 1939,

four million new homes were built across Britain.

And for the first time in our history, the vast majority of these had proper gardens.

First of all there was the actual planning of new suburbs,

with wider roads, with trees, with these long gardens,

with vegetable gardens and flowers and ponds and everything.

It's the continuation of a passionate Victorian idea,

that we must live close to nature in order to

have a good quality of life and to be fully human.

The inter-war 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.

The importance of gardens and cities is classically revealed, if you have an aerial photograph,

where you rise up above and instead of the gardens being separate,

discreet, small, 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.

The creation of the modern suburban garden, in the 1920s and 1930s,

set the stage on which the relationship between homeowners and garden birds

would play out over the rest of the 20th century.

One bird would lead the way.

That quintessential garden bird, the robin.

We have always loved robins for their confiding behaviour.

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 makes them incredibly popular.

And their fondness for earthworms

has engendered a very special relationship with gardeners.

Anybody who's turning over soil, from the gravedigger to the lady

digging her rose bed, robins' cupboard love will triumph over them

and they'll tend your operations with great care.

In the 1930s, one man began scrutinising the behaviour of the robin,

the first time anyone had done so.

David Lack was a schoolmaster at Dartington College in Devon.

He carried out his robin research by trapping and ringing his subjects,

so that he could tell each bird apart and follow their individual behaviour.

What he discovered pulled the rug from under the cherished idea that each of us has a particular robin

returning to our garden, year after year.

I was absolutely knocked out by the realisation that the robin we had in the garden wasn't the same

robin we had last week or a week before so... Certainly not the year before.

The robin's traditional reputation was further undermined by the next part of Lack's research.

Unlike most birds,

which wear gaudy plumage to attract a mate,

the robin's red breast serves quite the opposite purpose.

It's used as war paint, a threat to scare off a rival robin entering his territory.

Now, David Lack did these famous experiments were he put a stuffed robin out into a robin's territory

and the owner came out and just attacked it

and basically destroyed the stuffed robin.

# If you ever step on my patch

# I'll bring you down Bring you down... #

'Our pretty robin red breast turns out to be a very belligerent fellow.'

Lack published his findings in a book, The Private Life Of The Robin.

This became an unexpected bestseller,

and changed the way we study birds forever.

The notion that you could take one species and write a book that was that thick,

in which you dealt with territory, in which you dealt with song,

in which you dealt with behavioural postures...

That was a revelation and as far as I know, I may be wrong,

but that was the first time that one particular bird was given

that kind of intensive treatment.

It's more than half a century since David Lack unmasked the robin as a short-lived, feisty little bird.

And yet the sentimental Victorian image of it persists.

So there's this curious disconnect

between our notion of the friendly robin, the bird 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 book was published, Britain was at war again.

And the British garden was being redesigned as part of the war effort.

As far as gardens were concerned, the Ministry of Food realised that

there was an enormous, unused land resource there in people's gardens.

And the high, top priority was

to produce as much food at home as we possibly could.

So they started with a massive advertising campaign.

The Dig For Victory campaign instructed people to convert their flowerbeds into vegetable patches

so that they could produce their own food

to supplement their meagre rations.

'You may not be lucky enough to own an ideal kitchen garden like this,

'but the flower garden will grow beetroot just as well as begonias.

'There may be room for vegetables on top of your Anderson shelter

'or in the backyard, or even on that flat bit of roof.'

Home-grown fruit and veg may have livened up the monotonous

wartime diet but they also proved attractive to birds.

And for the second time in a generation, garden birds discovered we were fickle friends.

'Surely, isn't an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?'

The birds, of course, did become the gardener's enemy

in a much stronger way when your diet depended on

protecting your crops from the birds.

So I think people, they always have had and this time they still had,

a sort of love-hate relationship with the bird population of the garden.

So they would rig up all sorts of arrangements, netting their crops.

The Ministry of Food also urged people to either eat leftovers, or recycle them.

So scraps, once given to the birds, now ended up in communal pig bins.

It was a lean time for garden birds,

and even when the war came to an end, rationing continued.

Britain now entered a period of austerity.

But curiously, our attitudes to gardens,

and our attitudes to garden birds, began to change.

There was a slight reaction.

People really 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, written by Phyllis Barclay-Smith.

This was the 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.

She begins by saying that because of industrialisation

and the growth of the town, our garden birds are threatened.

And we must make habitats for them.

She tells you what trees to plant,

where they like nesting most, you know, hawthorn, holly...

Welcoming the birds back and making the garden beautiful

and not fiercely productive

is a wonderful sort of reaction to the ferocity of war.

The design of post-war housing reinforced these trends,

by placing the kitchen at the back of the house,

with a clear view of the garden.

The number of sinks I've seen that actually look down the garden,

and you put objects of interest, a sort of entertainment, out there.

One of them is the bird table so that you look from the kitchen sink,

which is the epitome of drudgery, at least if you're me,

into the garden which is the epitome of freedom

and there are these birds coming and going.

And outside, the nation's second favourite bird, the blue tit, was getting up to some novel antics.

'It's not only humans who enjoy a drink of milk.

'People 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.

It's one of those things that folk of venerable years such as myself

like to reminisce about, we were around during the milk bottle years.

You would go out the front door

and you'd say, "Those dratted blue tits have been at it again!"

I can see the little holes in the milk bottle tops.

And I hadn't thought about that for years.

In those days, a milk bottle was put outside

by your friendly milkman who's having an affair with your wife,

that was absolutely standard and... they had these gold top things,

the sort of silver paper thing on there

but blue tits and great tits learned how to peck through them

because there was cream on top.

Because blue tits and great tits are kind of inquisitive birds,

always poking around and

peeling off bits of bark, lifting up leaves, looking for food items.

Peeling off the lid of a milk bottle is not that different, really.

The extraordinary thing, and it is extraordinary,

was that that behaviour spread right round the country.

This wasn't an example of evolution in action, but simply a case

of individual birds watching and learning from each other.

A process which scientists call cultural transmission.

Birds are doing these things all the time, it's just that

with the milk bottles we could see that cultural transmission.

The milk bottle thing was like a little window into their world.

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.

Most people didn't begrudge the tits their share of the cream,

perhaps because they were one of the earliest birds to establish themselves in suburbia.

But the post-war period also saw the arrival of two newcomers to the suburban scene.

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.

I love all birds, but the collared dove,

there's something essentially very boring about it.

But behind this rather dull...

Somebody I know described its song as a rather bored football fan.

"U-nit-ed." This kind of three-note song, "U-nit-ed."

And there is something very dreary about collared doves

and they're beige in colour.

But they conceal an incredible story of expansion.

Originally from south-west Asia, the collared dove started,

inexplicably, to surge westwards across Europe during the 1930s.

By the mid-1950s, it had managed to cross the North Sea.

Probably one of the least glamorous twitches I ever went on was to north Norfolk, Sheringham I think it was,

in about 1954 or 55 to see a pair of collared doves which are...

talk about ten-a-penny now!

And somebody must have noticed it cos I think they'd been there

for a year and bred before they were announced to the world, as it were.

Certainly they've adapted to urban and suburban environments in an incredibly positive way.

And it now must be one of the ten most common birds in the British garden.

Unlike the collared dove, there was little chance of our second newcomer,

the ring-necked parakeet, slipping into the back garden unnoticed.

Parakeets are interesting because in the UK they shout foreignness.

They're bright green, they have red beaks, they have this loud, raucous call.

The arrival of parakeets,

initially in West London gardens,

quickly attracted the attention of the media.

'It's thought that a pair

'of Indian parakeets escaped from a local aviary in 1968

'and rapidly became acclimatised to living rough, British-style.

'One of them visited the back garden of Mrs Vera Tompkins

'who's always loved birds ever since she was a young girl.'

'One came and sat on the top of the pear tree in the next garden

'and I thought what a wonderful thing it would be if he 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 22.

Despite their tropical appearance, parakeets are well adapted to the British climate,

and have taken to the artificial habitat of suburbia as well as any of our other garden birds.

I have to say I like them. They, of course, make a mess and

make a noise but, by golly, they're lovely, aren't they? They're absolutely beautiful.

I get up in the morning and look out and there's six or eight parakeets.

And it doesn't half gladden the heart.

And yet the parakeet's acceptance as a truly British bird is not quite complete.

I'm one of the growing number

of people that 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.

To start with, it was probably a little touch of the exotic and maybe that has darkened because

it's become more successful and there are rumblings that these

hole-nesting birds might start to have an effect on native species.

I think that we will see changes in our response by naturalists

and you'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 21st 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 late 20th century

that a revolution took place in the way we attract birds to our gardens.

It was a revolution borne out of our growing affluence as a nation,

and would come to define our contemporary relationship with garden birds.

And it was led by bird food.

When I was a little boy, there was a great British tradition of trying to chop coconuts in half.

I vividly remember the kind of fiasco of try to hit this thing

and it was...you know. And what you fed to birds

was coconuts if you were posh, and breadcrumbs if you weren't,

kind of thing. That was it.

In the absence of commercially available bird food,

the British had traditionally fed garden birds on kitchen scraps.

As our enthusiasm for feeding grew,

those with time and money went further.

When you're cooking for birds, there's no need for any of this continental sophistication.

And Indian curries are right out. No spices, no salt incidentally either.

We'll do a bird pudding.

Now you need 12 ounces...

'People liked the idea of cookery, cookery for birds'

so if you did a sort of a recipe

with fat of some kind and seeds, you can make a kind of cake

out of this and of course that's very attractive to birds.

I'm going over here...

like so. And I've got one in there already, of course,

to show you what it looks like when it's finished.

At the end of the day,

you've got a baked cake really, a flat cake.

But with increasing demands on our time, fewer people were cooking for themselves, let alone for the birds.

They turned to a convenient alternative -

peanuts in a red net bag.

These were low-grade nuts deemed unfit for human consumption.

Although they were potentially nutritious for birds,

they had a drawback nobody knew about.

The problem with peanuts used to be that large proportions of them

coming into the bird food trade were toxic

and they were contaminated with aflatoxin,

which is a breakdown product of a mould.

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 till May and then there would be no birds left.

And knowing where I got the peanuts from at the time, and to what I now know,

by that point, I'd managed to kill off the green finch in the garden.

In the late 1970s, the bird food industry began to innovate,

developing high quality products designed to mimic the food eaten

by wild birds.

These increasingly sophisticated products attracted more species than ever to our gardens -

well over 100 different kinds.

They also proved irresistible to bird-loving shoppers.

It's quite striking to look at the way in which the packaging, the convenience of bird foods

kind of tracked the way in which we've changed our own eating habits.

The whole rise and rise of the prepared meals in Marks & Spencers

is echoed by being able to buy the fat bar.

None of this melting down, getting fat from the butcher and melting it down and mixing it

with peanuts and things, it's there in a plastic package.

Today, feeding birds is yet another way in which we express ourselves as consumers.

I think a lot of people deep down to 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, I get... I've got lots of chaffinches.

"I've got a great garden for birds, what have you got?"

There is that competitive edge which is fine because it's benefiting the birds, either way you look at it.

On top of that, it's bringing nature closer to that person as well.

It is this deeper need to reconnect with nature that underpins our vast expenditure on bird food.

Day after day, people provide food for birds

and extraordinarily, relationships of trust

are built up and 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, that it 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 a semi-domesticated space.

We may be in danger

of turning these birds into little more than wild pets.

I think the wish to feed garden birds

is part of a...

larger emotional wish to make the birds somehow dependent on us.

To 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 preferred some plants at the expense of others,

and waged war on those we consider to be weeds.

Now having invested time and money bringing birds into this space,

we subconsciously want to control them, too.

We want them to behave in ways that conform to our own moral codes.

If you put a bird table up in your garden,

you are creating a sparrowhawk feeding station.

It's quite funny and distressing to realise that when sparrowhawk zip along the backs of suburban gardens,

they're just taking advantage of these wonderful feeding stations people have produced for them.

People get very upset about sparrowhawks, for example, because

they see their gardens as an extension of their living space.

So, when you look out of the window and see a sparrowhawk pulling a pigeon or blackbird to pieces

on your patio, it's kind of murder on the living room floor.

This is why some birds become...

described as being mean, evil or villainous.

Because they become part of the human world.

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 whisking through and basically takes that away...

..I think, inside, you're going, "Ah, that's mine!"

And you know you've lost something.

As a result, many of us divide garden birds into two camps.

On one side, our friends.

And on the other, our enemies.

We project human values onto the birds and then admire them for them, or dislike them for them.

We like the robin because it's tame and confiding. Or so it appears.

In fact, it's the merest cupboard love.

We dislike magpies and starlings

because we think they're noisy, rackety birds.

Vulgar, aggressive. These are all human characteristics.

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.

The way that many people view magpies,

as the arch-villain of the garden soap opera, is a case in point.

Magpies are big, bold songbirds

with not much of a song,

but a great taste in young songbirds of other species.

We really hate the fact that they eat our blackbirds...

..and steal our tits out of the bushes.

They're confident, they're cocky, 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

that magpies are responsible for the recent decline in songbirds.

There's no scientific evidence that magpies have been responsible for the decrease

in garden birds and songbirds in general that we see across Britain.

The BTO were involved in a very detailed survey.

We were involved in that as well.

From a scientific point of view, there is no evidence for that.

Magpies, I defend to the death.

I've had many fights with people over magpies.

People talking about, "Oh, magpies, sparrowhawks, they cause the decline of all the songbirds."

Well, I think we're using magpies and sparrowhawks as scapegoats, really.

Because we are the animals that have caused the decline of songbirds much more than any of those birds.

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.

Our cats kill 55 million birds every year.

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, our friends, and our enemies.

And in the garden bird family, there has always been one poor relation -

the house sparrow. 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.

As a birder myself, I never used to really look at them.

And after a while, I realised they weren't around any more.

I used to see them all over the place.

Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, if you went to the cafe,

had a cup of tea, there'd be a load of sparrows by your feet.

And all of a sudden, there were none there.

Every park had an old gentleman who fed the sparrows.

He always had his arms out, a hat on, covered in sparrows.

Then you could do it, too.

I've got photographs of them from that time. But you won't find them now when you go out there.

In the early 1990s, people living in Britain's towns and cities began

to notice that their local sparrows were rapidly disappearing.

They wrote to their local newspapers, contacted their local councillors,

even questions were asked in the House of Commons.

What is happening to sparrows?

Having been taken for granted for so long,

the 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 launched a campaign to investigate.

They offered a prize of £5,000

to the first person who wrote a published paper,

accepted in a peer-reviewed journal, that explained the urban decline.

It turns out 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 into maturity.

Ironically, history may be repeating itself.

Having dealt a major blow to sparrow populations in the 1930s,

motor vehicles are once again being linked to the current catastrophic decline.

And the one common cause I think upon is atmospheric pollution.

Atmospheric pollution coming from vehicles.

Although the Independent's prize has not yet been awarded,

it seems likely that factors beyond the garden fence

are responsible for the sparrow's demise.

Just like the miner's canary,

our sparrows may be telling us something important.

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.

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 we've drawn them deeper into our domestic and emotional lives

than any other group of birds.

The story of garden birds is just one aspect of the long, eventful and often surprising relationship

between the British and our birdlife.

Over the next three programmes, we'll explore this side of our nation's history,

through our spectacular seabirds,

the birds of the British countryside.

And starting next time with the story of how we came to protect waterbirds,

and the wild and wonderful places where they live.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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