Birds Britannia. Stephen Moss

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СКАЧАТЬ a particular Robin returning to our garden, year after year – as Lack found, most Robins live for a year or two, at most. In 1943, a decade after he began his research, Lack published his findings in a slim volume, The Life of the Robin. As a young birdwatcher growing up in Plymouth, just down the road from Dartington, Tony Soper recalls his amazement on first reading the book: ‘I was absolutely knocked out by the realisation that the Robin we had in the garden was not the same Robin we had last week, or the week before; and certainly not the same Robin as the year before!’

      The Robin’s traditional reputation was further undermined by the next part of Lack’s research. Many years later, in 1969, the BBC wildlife documentary The Private Life of the Robin revealed Lack’s findings in all their colourful, gory detail to an amazed audience.

      Lack had discovered that unlike most birds, which use colour primarily to attract a mate, the Robin’s red breast has a very different purpose. It has been described as ‘war paint’ – used to drive away any rival entering the Robin’s territory.

      To prove that this was the case, Lack carried out a simple but highly effective experiment. He placed a dead, stuffed Robin in a prominent position in a male Robin’s territory, then stood back to see what would happen. To his astonishment, the territory holder viciously attacked the stuffed bird, pecking repeatedly at its head, and pulling off whole clumps of feathers with its bill. As the commentary of The Private Life of the Robin put it, ‘our pretty robin redbreast turns out to be a very belligerent fellow.’

      Lack’s book on Robin behaviour became a surprise bestseller. The Life of the Robin also inspired a new generation of naturalists, including David Attenborough: ‘The notion that you could take one species and write a whole book in which you dealt with territory, song, behavioural postures, and so on, was a revelation – and as far as I know this was the first time that one particular bird was given that kind of intensive treatment.’

      It is more than half a century since David Lack unmasked the Robin as a short-lived, feisty little bird. And yet in many ways, despite Lack’s revelations, the sentimental Victorian image of it persists today, as Mark Cocker notes: ‘There’s this curious disconnect between our notion of the “friendly Robin” – the bird that 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 Life of the Robin was published, Britain had been at war again for four long years. And as garden historian Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall notes, the British garden was being completely redesigned as part of the war effort: ‘As far as the garden was concerned, the Ministry of Food realised there was an enormous unused land resource right there, in people’s gardens. And the top priority was to produce as much food, at home, as we possibly could.’

      The Dig for Victory campaign was instigated soon after the start of the war. Run by the charismatic Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, the campaign instructed people to convert their flower-beds into vegetable patches, so that they could produce their own food to supplement their meagre rations. This helped reduce dependence on imported food, whose supplies had swiftly dried up because of the hostilities.

      Posters, pamphlets and memorable government propaganda films on cinema newsreels all helped to spread the minister’s message:

      You may not be lucky enough to own an ideal kitchen garden like this, but a flowerbed will grow beetroots just as well as begonias, and there may be room for vegetables on top of the Anderson Shelter, or in your backyard, or even on that flat roof – and surely, isn’t an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?

      Home-grown fruit and vegetables may have helped to liven up monotonous wartime rations but they also proved attractive to birds. And for the second time in a generation, garden birds discovered we were fickle friends, as Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall recalls: ‘The birds did of course become the gardener’s enemy, in a much stronger way when your diet depended on protecting your crops from the birds. Gardeners always have had – and especially at this time – a love-hate relationship with the birds of the garden.’

      So people came up with ingenious strategies to keep birds off their precious fruit and veg, including home-made nets created from wooden sticks and cotton thread. But unlike the situation in the First World War that had given rise to the sparrow clubs, this time the government recognised that birds played a vital role in killing agricultural pests, so there were no longer calls for wholesale culls.

      Nevertheless, birds continued to suffer: at a time when many people were close to starving themselves, they were hardly likely to put out waste food for the birds to eat. The Ministry of Food urged people to either eat leftovers, or recycle them, so scraps once given to the birds now ended up in communal pig bins.

      Birds also suffered badly during two of the hardest winters of the twentieth century, 1939–40 and 1946–7. Even though the second of these freezing winters occurred nearly two years after the end of the war, this was still a lean time for garden birds, as food rationing continued to be in force for almost a decade after the end of the conflict.

      * * *

      Britain now entered a period of austerity. This would continue right up to the end of the 1950s, when increased economic prosperity finally led Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to make his famous pronouncement that ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’ But curiously, our attitudes to gardens – and our attitudes to garden birds – began to change long before this, as Jenny Uglow points out: ‘There was a slight reaction, and people 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, published in the ‘King Penguin’ series. Garden Birds was written by the secretary of the RSPB, Phyllis Barclay-Smith.

      Barclay-Smith was a tough, no-nonsense woman in a largely male-dominated world. She served for more than half a century as the assistant secretary of the RSPB, where she was affectionately nicknamed ‘The Dragon’, and was once described (by the leading conservationist Max Nicholson) as ‘the queen bee in her global hive’.

      She was also one of the very first people to realise the enormous potential of winning converts to the conservation cause through the birds people saw every day from their back window. The title of her book was the very 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.

      Garden Birds was, as you might expect from the author’s character, relentlessly no-nonsense and practical in its approach, as Jenny Uglow notes:

      She begins by saying that because of industrialisation and the growth of the town, our garden birds are threatened; and that we must make habitats for them. She tells you what trees to plant, where the birds like to nest, and so on. Welcoming the birds back, and not making the garden fiercely productive, is a wonderful reaction to the ferocity of war.

      The design of post-war housing also reinforced these trends. In most Victorian and Edwardian homes the kitchen was at the side of the house, out of sight of the back garden. But post-war architects often placed the kitchen at the back of the house, with a clear view of the garden. Jenny Uglow believes this made a huge difference to the growth of interest in garden birds: ‘The number of sinks I’ve seen which look down the garden, and you put objects of interest and entertainment out there, such as the bird table. And so you look from the sink, which is the epitome of drudgery, into the garden, which is the epitome of freedom – and there are these birds, coming and going.’

      Outside, the nation’s second-favourite bird СКАЧАТЬ