We have heard a lot about the disappearing birds of the fields and countryside - such as the skylark, but more remarkable, in a way, is the drop in numbers of house sparrows. Your ordinary sparrow. On a personal level, this has been noted for a few years in houses in southern Dublin and in farms and other houses in eastern counties. So strong has its impact been in Britain that the English Independent newspaper has offered a prize of £5,000 for an essay published in a scientific journal which, in the opinion of referees, accounts for the "recent, sudden precipitate decline of the house sparrow Passer domesticus in Britain, particularly in towns and cities." The sparrow, some think, in this country may be merely relocating - and the Independent notes that they nest in loose colonies of up to 20 pairs - but why have they moved, if just moved they have? Some say that it is the lesser availability of seed, now that horses have disappeared from urban areas - and grain from their feeding bags and from their dung on the streets is no longer available. But all that disappeared long ago and we had sparrows until very recent years.
Then there is the theory that there has been a mass disappearance of the insects that the birds need to feed their young. But house sparrows, in the words of the Independent's Environment Correspondent, Michael McCarthy: "have been found breeding 14,000 feet up in the Himalayas and nearly 2,000 feet down in a Yorkshire coal mine. The bird occurs naturally all across Eurasia and flourishes where it has been introduced in Southern Africa, the Americas and Australasia, but for some reason no longer in Britain." The loss of sparrows in Britain has gone down on agricultural land with other species such as the yellowhammer - to do with intensive farming. But why in urban surroundings? It is noted that while London with other British cities has lost its sparrows, Paris was still full of the birds. And what a literary and Biblical bird it is. "I watch and am as a sparrow alone on the house top." (Psalms). In Hamlet: "there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow."
And Thoreau of Walden: "I once had a sparrow alight on my shoulder for a moment while I was digging in a village garden and I felt that I was more distinguished by the circumstance that I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn." Good on the Independent for putting up that prize.