Birds Britannia. Stephen Moss

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СКАЧАТЬ opened a window and released them into the city streets.

      The date of the story – 1969 – certainly fits with the initial arrival of the birds, but no one has ever managed to verify its truth. Even if they could, it seems highly unlikely that the entire UK population – now numbering well into the thousands – could have descended from just one pair.

      A far more plausible explanation for their origin is that cage-bird dealers either deliberately or accidentally released flocks of parakeets in several locations around the London suburbs over a period of time, and that these sociable birds eventually managed to find each other and breed. Certainly in the past two decades numbers have increased very rapidly indeed, with more than 3,000 birds seen at a single roost at Esher Rugby Club, Surrey, until the trees in which they spent the night were cut down a few years ago.

      Today the Ring-necked Parakeet is a familiar sight on garden bird feeders and in wooded parks throughout the London suburbs with small colonies of the birds spreading farther afield. They have since been recorded in many places across the country, including Yorkshire, Lancashire, North and South Wales, and southern Scotland.

      Despite their tropical appearance, these parakeets are well adapted to the British climate – their origins in the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India mean they can cope perfectly well with below-zero temperatures.

      They have also taken to the artificial habitat of suburbia as well as any of our other garden birds. David Attenborough, who regularly sees parakeets in his leafy garden in Richmond-upon-Thames in Surrey, welcomes their presence here: ‘I have to say I like them. They of course make a mess and they make a noise, but by golly they’re lovely, aren’t they? They’re absolutely beautiful! I get up in the morning and I look out and there are six or eight parakeets, and it doesn’t half gladden the heart.’

      And yet the Ring-necked Parakeet’s acceptance as a truly British bird is not quite complete. Their propensity to feed on fruit buds, and concerns that they might drive out native hole-nesting species such as Starlings, Jackdaws and Stock Doves, has even led to the species being placed on the pest register.

      ‘The Urban Birder’ David Lindo, who sees the parakeets every day on his local patch at Wormwood Scrubs in West London, is definitely not a fan of what he regards as alien invaders: ‘I’m one of the growing number of people who 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.’

      Mark Cocker takes a more measured view, for the moment at least:

      To start with they brought a little touch of the exotic, and maybe that has darkened because they’ve become more successful, and there are rumblings that these hole-nesting birds might start to have an effect on native species. I think we’ll see changes in the response from naturalists, and we’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 twenty-first 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 latter decades of the twentieth century that a revolution took place in the way we attract birds to our gardens – and at the very same time, a parallel agricultural revolution was making the wider countryside an increasingly difficult and hostile place for birds to live in.

      The garden-bird revolution was born out of our growing affluence as a nation, and also from our material prosperity as individuals, which would come to define our contemporary relationship with garden birds. And it was led by bird food.

      In the years since birds had first begun to come into gardens, we had fed them – when we had bothered to do so at all – on leftovers from our own table. There was one exception to this: a rather exotic addition to their diet, as environmentalist Chris Baines, who pioneered the modern concept of gardening for wild-life, recalls from his own childhood: ‘When I was a little boy there was a great British tradition of trying to chop coconuts in half, and I vividly remember the fiasco of trying to hit this thing as it was skidding off the table. What you fed to birds was coconuts if you were posh, and breadcrumbs if you weren’t – that was it!’

      As our enthusiasm for feeding garden birds grew, those with time and money went further. By the early 1980s, when birdman and broadcaster Tony Soper was making his series Discovering Birds for the BBC, there was a whole host of ingenious recipes for feeding the birds. Tony himself demonstrated one of these – a kind of pudding made from high-energy ingredients – on the programme. As he now recalls, he did so in the tongue-in-cheek style of one of the pioneering TV chefs, the ‘Galloping Gourmet’ Graham Kerr: ‘People liked the idea of cooking for birds, so if you did one of these cod recipes, with fat of some kind, and seeds, of course that’s very attractive to the birds.’

      But with increasing demands on their time, fewer and fewer people were cooking for themselves, let alone for the birds. Instead, they turned to a convenient, shop-bought alternative – peanuts in a red net bag. These were low-grade nuts, which had been deemed unfit for human consumption. Although they were potentially nutritious for birds, they had a drawback nobody knew about, as ornithologist Chris Whittles remembers: ‘The problem with peanuts used to be that a large proportion of them coming into the birdfood trade were toxic, contaminated with aflatoxin, which is a breakdown product of a mould.’

      And as Chris Whittles now recalls with wry embarrassment, 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 to May, and then there would be no birds left. And knowing where I got the peanuts at the time, and knowing what I now know, by that point I’d managed to kill off all the Greenfinches in the garden!’

      Ironically, Chris Whittles was one of the first people to realise the seriousness and extent of the problem, and when he set up his own bird-food business, CJ Wildbird Foods, he took great care to source his peanuts so that they did not contain the poison.

      He was also, along with a handful of other pioneers, one of those who during the 1970s and 1980s began to innovate, developing high-quality products designed to mimic the food eaten by wild birds, including sunflower seeds and hearts, nyger seed (particularly loved by Goldfinches) and a wide range of fat-based products.

      Indeed for the Goldfinch, one of the most beautiful of our garden birds, these new products led to a change in the species’ fortunes. After a sharp decline from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the Goldfinch population has bounced back rapidly. This is largely thanks to the widespread provision of high-energy seeds, and flocks of these colourful birds are now a very common sight on garden bird feeders. Its close relative the Siskin – a small, streaky finch with green, yellow and black plumage – has also benefitted from a rise in garden bird feeding, enabling it to extend its range southwards from Scotland into southern Britain. Today the Siskin is a relatively frequent visitor to many gardens, especially in late winter and early spring when supplies of natural food are at their lowest.

      Other unusual species also came into our gardens, many for the first time, attracted by these increasingly sophisticated foods that quickly and efficiently deliver the energy the birds need. Today, well over one hundred different kinds of bird have been recorded coming to bird tables and feeders. Whereas we once only saw sparrows, Starlings, tits and finches, by the early twenty-first century, garden birdwatchers were enjoying such unexpected visitors as Great Spotted Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, Blackcaps and Long-tailed Tits.

      The new products, stacked on supermarket shelves in bright, colourful wrappers, also proved irresistible to bird-loving shoppers. Chris Baines regards this as simply another aspect of the growing consumerism СКАЧАТЬ