Sparrows have gone from my world, and it seems it's not just from my world. They're disappearing in their mother countries, too, in Europe, and Italy is so concerned it has a special program to try to revive their numbers. I learnt that yesterday when I phoned the program manager for Birds in Backyards (birdsinbackyards.net), Holly Parsons, to ask where the sparrows had gone.
Ms Holly said many people had noticed that our house sparrows were disappearing, and she learnt about their European decline at an urban birds conference in Europe late last year. Theories, she said, include a chemical in unleaded petrol hitting them hard or a change in gardening fashion depriving them of their favourite nesting shrubs.
I have not seen a single sparrow for at least several years, when a decade ago flocks of them were common. In fact, they'd been a perennial presence in my daily view all my life, and suddenly they're gone. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, pffft.
I have no theories for their woes in Europe, but I'd been happy to believe that here on the east coast they'd been driven out of urban areas by, first, the introduced Indian myna and, later, the surging numbers of the native (and unrelated) noisy miner. As you'll know, the house sparrow is itself an introduced bird, brought over in the 1860s and 1870s from Britain and Europe to make Australia more like home. They are universally regarded in Australia as a pest, although they were, and still are in places I'm sure, an inoffensive little bird, unlike the aggressive, strutting Indian myna.
The composition of our urban bird life seems to have changed markedly in the past decade, and often there's an obvious reason for that. Magpies, for example, have, as ground-feeding butcher birds, made good use of increasing number of lawns to increase their numbers, and the migrating channel-billed cuckoo has been arriving in increasing numbers each September and October to take advantage of the increasing numbers of its host, the magpie. The rainbow lorikeet has moved into Newcastle and Lake Macquarie in huge flocks, and I suspect they're taking advantage of a greater and all-year-round variety of flowering shrubs and trees. Other members of the parrot family seem to have sought refuge from the drought in cities and decided to stay. A friend tells me he's seen a pair of yellow-tailed black cockatoos over Tighes Hill and Carrington this year, and that's special.
Can you shed any light on the disappearance of the house sparrow? And what birdlife changes have you noticed this year?
See how Jeff and the biggest losers are going at the Lose Weight with Corbett blog.
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