Birds Britannia. Stephen Moss

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      The sparrow club was a way of dealing with this urban and suburban ‘vermin species’. It involved a cluster of working-class people who would bring in their tallies from the sparrows they had killed in their allotment or their garden, and the person who had killed the greatest number of sparrows would win a silver cup for that year.

      One poster, issued by the grandly named Bedfordshire War Agricultural Executive Committee, reveals the rewards available for those who were prepared to catch and kill sparrows, just as their ancestors had done in Elizabethan times. Bounties offered by the local parish council were a penny for a dozen sparrows’ eggs, tuppence for a dozen unfledged sparrows, and threepence for a dozen fledged ones – which meant that a skilled collector could amass a tidy sum given that, at the time, a pint of beer would have cost about sixpence. Rats provided an even higher reward: as much as two shillings per dozen, though they were presumably harder to catch.

      The methods used to catch the sparrows themselves varied considerably, from large nets to specially made cane traps advertised in catalogues. These inevitably caught all sorts of other small birds in the process, as those doing the catching weren’t always either very expert or discriminating. And once caught, the birds weren’t all immediately killed, as Frederick Milton explains: ‘They were taken to gentleman’s clubs or to pubs, where they were then used as targets for trap-shooting.’

      Ironically, the actions of the sparrow clubs may have themselves contributed to food shortages, as they did not take into account the beneficial effects sparrows had on killing harmful pests such as insects, especially during the spring when the adult birds were feeding their young.

      And ultimately, even though hundreds of thousands of sparrows were killed by sparrow clubs during the war, it may all have been in vain. Because the culls took place in late summer – at the end of the breeding season, when numbers were at their peak – the killing appears to have had very little impact on the overall population.

      Ironically, it was what we did in peacetime that would bring about a collapse in sparrow numbers. During the 1920s and 1930s, the coming of motor vehicles meant the end for the main form of urban transport since people had first moved into cities: the horse. The internal combustion engine – in private cars, buses and taxicabs – soon triumphed. Horse-drawn transport rapidly began to vanish from our city streets.

      And with it went our old friend – and occasional enemy – the House Sparrow. City sparrows had long depended on horse feed and undigested seeds in horse droppings for food. So the replacement of horses by cars and buses deprived them of a vital resource. Sparrow expert Denis Summers-Smith believes that this marked the start of the House Sparrow’s long, slow decline – a decline which, as we shall discover, continues today.

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      Without even trying, we had reduced the numbers of the House 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 – the start of what Christopher Frayling calls ‘the garden bird phenomenon’: ‘If you read books about birds in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no one talks about “garden birds”. It goes with the growth of suburbia.’

      And grow suburbia certainly did. In just two decades, from 1920 to 1939, four million new homes were built across Britain, many of them in the ‘new towns’ such as Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City and Stevenage, on the outskirts of London; others in the suburbs of the capital itself. Moreover, for the first time in our nation’s history, the vast majority of these had proper gardens. Jenny Uglow believes that this came down to large-scale planning at a national level: ‘First of all there was the planning of new suburbs, with wider roads and trees, and long gardens. It’s the continuation of a passionate Victorian idea, that we must live close to nature, in order to live a good quality of life, and to be fully human.’

      The interwar 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. But it took some time for us to appreciate the wider ecological benefits this would bring – a network of ‘mini-habitats’ creating a much greater whole than the sum of the individual parts, as Mark Cocker notes: ‘The importance of gardens in cities is classically revealed if you have an aerial photograph, where you rise up above, and instead of the gardens being separate, discrete, 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.’ Today, gardens cover more than one million acres in area – bigger than all our nature reserves put together – and provide a vital haven for many species of songbird that would otherwise be in serious trouble, because of what is happening in the wider countryside.

      The creation of the modern suburban garden during the 1920s and 1930s set the stage on which the relationship between homeowners and garden birds would play out over the rest of the twentieth century. And one species would lead the way: that quintessential garden bird, the Robin.

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      No other British bird inspires quite the same affection as the Robin. Indeed the name itself is actually a nickname – just as our ancestors referred to the ‘Jenny Wren’ and ‘Tom Tit’, so the bird officially known as the ‘Redbreast’ acquired the prefix ‘Robin Redbreast’. Gradually the second part of this was dropped, and today we use only the nickname for this familiar little bird.

      Part of our great affection for the Robin stems from their confiding behaviour, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘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 just makes them incredibly popular.’

      And their fondness for earthworms has engendered a very special relationship with gardeners, as Mark Cocker attests: ‘For anybody who is turning over soil, from the gravedigger to the lady digging her rose bed, the Robin’s cupboard love will triumph, and they’ll attend your operations with great care!’

      We now know that long before human beings came along, Robins would carefully follow large animals, especially those that dig for food, such as wild boars, in order to grab a worm or two. In Britain, where these bigger mammals had mostly disappeared, the Robin transferred its affections to human beings; whereas on the European mainland, the Robin remains a shy, woodland bird.

      But despite the Robin being a very common and familiar species in Britain, even by the 1930s most aspects of its behaviour were virtually unknown. This was all to change when, for the very first time in the long and intimate relationship between us and Robins, one man decided to delve a little deeper into the bird’s behaviour.

      His name was David Lack, and he would go on to become one of our leading ornithologists. He pioneered the new science of population biology, notably through his detailed studies of a fascinating group of birds found on the Galapagos Islands, known as Darwin’s finches. He was also, for more than a quarter of a century, Director of the prestigious Edward Grey Institute for Field Ornithology in Oxford. But in the early 1930s, after leaving Cambridge University, he had followed a more humble calling: taking a job as a schoolmaster at Dartington College, Devon.

      One of the most abundant birds in the school grounds was the Robin, and Lack decided to make a study of this common and, as was thought, familiar bird. What he discovered would change the way we regarded the Robin forever.

      Lack pioneered a simple but highly effective research method that is so commonly used today it is taken for granted. So that he could identify each bird, and work out the implications of every aspect of their day-to-day behaviour, he trapped all the Robins in the area, and gave them individual colour rings.

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