Dear Readers, usually it’s the starlings who are the juvenile delinquents on our road here in East Finchley, but this year has been a great year for house sparrows, and goodness knows they could do with some luck, as their numbers have been going down and down over the past fifty years, for reasons that are still not clear.  Anyhow, I was delighted to see them zipping about in both the front and back gardens. Has anyone else noticed how fast they are for such small birds? They can disappear into a hedge or tangle of honeysuckle faster than any other bird I know – sometimes I almost expect them to rebound straight back out again.

Anyhow, this gang seems to consist of several pairs of parents plus their hungry offspring, who follow the adults about as if attached by a length of elastic. Occasionally they’ll wait in the undergrowth waiting for food to arrive, usually with one eye on the sky.

Sometimes the adults take a sneaky breather, like this adult male, parked up beside a young starling. Usually I’m mobbed with fledgling starlings, but it’s been very quiet this year, I suspect because the wet spring led to a mismatch between the emergence of insects and the breeding of the starlings (who need invertebrate food for their youngsters).

Eventually the young sparrows start to peck tentatively at the plants around them while they wait for the adults to arrive. The one below was definitely looking for caterpillars or something similar when s/he wasn’t watching the sky.

I’ve been watching the little flock zipping around at the front of the house too – they often perch in the buddleia, which is having a tough year this year, but which is fortuitously home to all manner of small bugs.

And so, although house sparrows are the quintessential ‘little brown jobs’, I have thoroughly enjoyed watching their breeding success this year. And, as sparrows rarely travel more than a mile from the place that they were born, maybe the fledglings of these birds will visit next year.

I haven’t yet worked out where they’re breeding – certainly not in my sparrow ‘terrace’ which has been a resounding failure so far – but there are a number of dense hedges at the corner of the road, and some houses have little gaps in their Victorian eaves that the sparrows can use. House sparrows aren’t called Passer domesticus for nothing – they aren’t found very far away from human habitation, and they seem to rely on our kindess for housing, and our gardens for food. Fingers crossed that their numbers will soon be going up again. London wouldn’t be the same without its ‘cockney sparrers’.